Chapter 23: Pandora''s Box 2
Liza and Jonathan sat in silence as Jonathan gathered back his strength to speak bit by bit. Liza hadn''t
seen Jonathan like this in the time she had been with him. Even he was apologizing he had an air of
collectedness around him but at that moment Jonathan looked nothing less than a mess. Liza
wondered how long it will take to get out of the small room they were locked in, it was bing
increasingly suffocating for her especially with the heavy air surrounding them. "It''s my turn, right?"
Jonathan asked, his voice was rough as if he had screamed at the top of his lungs and had got a sore
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throat from that. And even though it was silent in that stuffy and dim room, it seemed to be deafening to
Liza. Liza nodded as a gesture for Jonathan to go ahead and ask her, his question.
The moment he had decided to challenge Liza to twenty questions, he had known that it wouldn''t be a
simple game, but he hadn''t realized either that it will feel like walking on edge of a knife. Jonathan
assessed Liza carefully as he asked her "Why didn''t you ever tell me that you knew about Stacy, even
when I med you?" Jonathan asked, cringing at Stacy''s name. He watched as Liza let out a breath
and leaned back against the dusty wall. She closed her eyes before opening them. Jonathan was
getting more anxious with every passing second. He had spent many nights wondering why Liza had
never confronted him. Why hadn''t she thrown it back at him when he had used her and more
importantly why she hadn''t defended herself?
Liza could feel anxiousness mixed with curiosity rolling of Jonathan. She opened her mouth to speak
and immediately Jonathan''s back straightened. "In the beginning, I didn''t confront you because I didn''t
want to lose you," Liza said. "I thought that if you knew that I was aware of Stacy, you would leave me
to be with her. So I pretended to be a fool. Besides that, I didn''t want to believe that you would ever
cheat on me. I tried so hard to convince myself that it wasn''t real, that it was just a misunderstanding. I
tried toe up with so many excuses, so many scenarios in which you woulde out to be
innocent. Looking back at myself now, I feel so pathetic and na?ve. I foolishly believed in happily ever
after''s and that love could ovee everything. I thought that if I showed how much I loved you, you
would stop meeting her, stop loving her, stop bringing little souvenirs in form of lipstick marks ad
hickeys from the time you spent with her. But you never stopped." Liz stopped to stop herself from
crumbling down in front of Jonathan as the painful memories came rushing down to her.
Jonathan watched as she took a deep breath in before continuing again, she never opened her eyes
while speaking "All those times I tried to do something special for you, have a romantic dinner, go out
on a date or simply make love, everything just zoomed past you and you continued to walk down that
path with me trailing behind trying to catch your attention." Liza said as she remembered those days
she had spent trying to get her Jonathan back.
"I wish I could go back to my old self and tell her to stop wasting time, to stop causing hurt to her own
heart by seeing you again and again. I may have seemed desperate back then but at that time all I
wanted was to make you see what we had, to stop our rtionship from crumbling down, in the end, it
didn''t matter anyway. We parted and I think that it was the best choice I made. I would still be living in
our suffocating rtionship, you would still be with Stacy and I would have still died little by little every
day. When you used me that day, all my whims about true love shattered and I realized that maybe
what we had wasn''t love anymore. Love is based on trust, respect, and faith. The moment you used
me, I realized that you had neither of them and without those three things love was nothing but a hollow
word. I stopped fighting for you, for our rtionship and for the love we once shared because it wasn''t
worth it anymore. I was just holding onto the remnants of a rtionship that had turned to ashes a long
time ago. So I let you go. Confronting you or throwing your affair with Stacy would have been useless,
it wouldn''t have mattered if you had apologized at that time. Defending myself would have been also a
waste because you didn''t even have a minimal amount of trust in me and what would I achieve by
living with someone who could me me without even asking me what it was about. So I didn''t bother
with either of them and just left." Liza said.
Her voice was soft but spective. It was as if she was assessing her past self and clucking at her
mistakes. Liza ad grown up a lot, she had be more mature, less fanciful, and more grounded. She
now left the idea of finding a perfect love for the romance novels and had satisfied herself with the love
she got from her family. She went out on dates but she was never really into the people she went out
with. There was always a hot man or a smart man or even someone who gave her butterflies but never
someone who made her heart thump. She was sure that she would meet someone someday who
would make her heart thump but this time she was in no hurry, she was satisfied and patient and she
would take time before falling for someone because she already had injuries from thest time she had
fallen and she wanted to be careful. Her scars were enough tost her a lifetime and she didn''t want
more.
Jonathan sat straight, listening to every word that came out from Liza''s out. The more he listened, the
more he realized what Liza had gone through. The letters Liza had written seemed like a daydream in
front of the nightmare Liza''s words were painting before him. He could hear the disapproval for her
actions and pain due to his sins in Liza''s voice and as he sat there with his back towards the wall and
his eyes hoping to catch Liza''s, to get a look inside her mind, he wondered if he would ever be able to
make up for the crime he hadmitted.