The Liliad/Liliad Thread 7

A quick snapshot of now. I am writing this from a hotel room, where I have been living for close to eight months. In general I do not go out, and no one seems to notice or care. My job can be done from anywhere in the world and this seems as good a place as any to put down roots. This weekend was the first time I’ve left my current city since 2012.

House keeping comes in every now and then but I do not usually let them. I am not in a pit of squalor, not quite Howard Hughes with bottles of pee. I’m in my home, my safe place. When I started writing this story I had just wanted to share a brief snippet of my life to cheer people up, which I thought might cheer me up as well. I had a fake ending planned and you can see hints of it in part one, I think. After writing it, though, I started to see the past in a different light.

Deciding to finish this story was not an easy choice. Leaving it be would be much easier. But I owe it to myself and I guess I owe it to anyone who has bothered to read. I’ve never written anything non-school or work related in my life and never thought more than a couple dozen people might read this story. Yet here we are.

I’m in my hotel room. You are wherever you are. How did I end up here? Well…let’s go back in time, about three years, to when part six ended.

Seventeen year old Lily and soon-to-be 22-year-old OP were in love with each other despite our families opposition. Although I shouldn’t go completely Romeo & Juliet on you - it was mostly her family’s opposition, I am certain I could have been fucking a goat and my father would only say “well don’t let him shit on MY couch”. (See that? Because OP is a faggot)

We were still separated by many countries but it did not matter to me. We started to experiment with getting intimate from afar — which is to say cybering and using cams and etc. Technology seemed to have advanced quite a bit, or maybe I was just slightly more desperate and she was more willing, but soon many of our conversations turned inappropriate before one of our bedtimes rolled around. I had a single bedroom at school, finally, so this also contributed to my ability to do as I pleased.

It was nothing like having her in my arms or in my bed. But it would do for now, I could handle it for the time being. Only as long as necessary, no longer. Sorry, no caps (at least on my end). And Lily did not become a complete slut (much as I hate using that word in the same sentence as her name), she was not stripping down to her underwear every time we spoke or typing “i suck your dick up and down and up and down mmmmm”. It was approximately half a step more sophisticated than that. I still have my sick animal mind but…our sex wasn’t really freaky, we’d never even tried oral or anything like that, so we didn’t try to broach those sorts of subjects. More just…trying to feel close to one another.

We’d used words alone for a very long time. It was nice to have a new medium. I guess that’s the best way to say it.

As most remember I was bearing down on graduation swiftly, with decent grades and a plan to ascend via nepotism into my father’s company. Taking over Lily’s dad’s job was still sort of my plan though I did not bring it up directly with my father. We agreed I’d move back home for a while after graduating with me working in the primary office. Essentially I’d be working as a drone, but that was alright by me. Better to at least appear to be earning my job.

Yeah, I’m disgusted by it too.

Though talking with Lily via Skype was easy enough sometimes we decided to use the phone. We never got inappropriate via that medium, though it wasn’t really a conscious choice. And I am not sure why we even bothered, but to me there is something slightly more intimate about a phone call. It was great to hear her voice, to hear her apprehensions about entering senior year. Maybe I just want to brag, but she was the classic genius who breezed through school and was (hopefully) going to be valedictorian. Which I’d say in Spanish to be funny/multicultural but fuck opening Google Translate just for that.

That semester there was only one other major incident. I was talking to my beloved regularly, I was marked as “in a relationship” on Facebook. Though without a name connected to it…well, whenever I see “in a relationship” without a name I assume it is someone creating an e-girlfriend. And my half-Asian girlfriend living in another country who I didn’t ever want to talk about sounded like the most fake girlfriend ever imagined in a masturbatory frenzy.

We talked on the phone every few weeks, text-chatted (what verb use guys) almost every day, and Skyped weekly. It was not enough to be overbearing and just frequent enough for me to have missed her every time her face popped up on Skype.

The sound of the Skype call being made became a sort of Pavlovian signal. I was always so excited (despite the shitty connection, the pixelation and sound delay) to see her smiling face appear. To hear her always-chipper “Hi!”. Maybe I am just mentally weak but when I was in a poor mood my own “hello” was usually glum, causing her to inquire. Far more often than not, though, my heart would leap and I would let out my own exuberant “hey!”. A long-distance relationship is garbage as you know, but we did our very best and I think we made it work.

Usually she’d describe her day, and I mine. Hers full of academia…and actually mine about the same. It was weird to have our lives running sort of parallel. Though generally my business classes intrigued her zero, her interests running more towards psychology (uh-oh will this become a problem) (nah). Lily learned to ask about balance sheets and/or business simulations and/or that one group project where no one is willing to do the goddamn powerpoint and I learned to ask about yearbooks and other things that my apparently racist self was unaware they had everywhere.

We were both kind of adults now. I liked the change in our relationship. But there was no change in how we talked, as open and clear as ever. I never felt like I had to hide things from her…from my uncomfortableness at the various senior parties, as the faggot friendless loser who doesn’t like drinking, to my depression at the future I was heading towards without ever really making any choices along the way. And she listened.

And she’d talk to me too. About the racial difficulties she faced, the class situation she found herself in (er, social class, that is), being fairly wealthy compared to the average person in her city, but the same as the other expat kids, meaning she never knew where to find friends. Her issues made me feel pretty small usually. And my “help” seemed useless whenever I offered it.

Maybe that’s how relationships work, though. She didn’t stop talking to me, or bringing things up. And my feelings for her were growing, eventually reaching the point there I figured there was no way they could go any further.

Oh, yeah, IM'ing. I’m red-faced right now. OP is a dumb.

Of course things had to hit a small bump. I had about a month of school left which had me waking up every morning fairly anxious. Ending my time in school was nice to look forward to, but diving into real life was not.

The logistics of being with Lily were also starting to hit me. I knew I couldn’t do long-distance permanently and I doubted she could either. We needed to be working towards being together, really together. So…there was a lot tumbling around in my mind when my phone rang on the way to eat or shit or perform some other incredibly important task. It was an unknown number from Lily’s country, I figured Lily calling from a friend’s phone, a nice surprise if an abnormal time.

So when a man’s voice came through my tinny speaker I was more than taken aback. Surprise! Her dad was back to let me know I was an ass. First he asked who it was, as if he didn’t know, then asked if this was my number. It clearly was. I said so.

Starting off with “you know I’m glad you’re coming to work with us”, he then went into a lengthy tirade about how inappropriate my relationship with Lily was. She was in high school and I was about to graduate from college, it was inappropriate, etc. He said he’d warned me off once before and judging by his phone bills I’d changed absolutely nothing. The man could get angry on a dime, and maybe it was just all the blood draining out of my head but it felt like he was shrieking into my ear by the end. It went on and on, and I said nothing.

At the end, I went for it. Kind of. “Your daughter and I care about each other. We’re so far apart, I’m not about to run off with her. But I care about her very much and I don’t think that’s going to change.”

He went on for a bit longer, saying that if she was an appropriate age when this shitshow had begun it wouldn’t be a problem, but she hadn’t been, and I was a pig for continuing it. He hung up, and that was that.

Though after I blocked him I realized that calling him was probably going to be necessary in the near future. Good thing I’m so forward-thinking, as I have been throughout this tale.

I decided not to mention it to Lily, who didn’t say anything to me either. Our phone calls became less frequent, to my disappointment, but I figured if her dad was still examining phone bills for international calls (what had happened to the thing where we avoided international calls on phone paid for by him? no idea) it was best to lay low. It felt dumb to be hiding any of it…but necessary at the same time. At least this time around I’d taken a huge step towards being less of a bitch. So that was good.

He was aware and creeping around in the background of our otherwise pretty-good love story. It made me concerned once in a while…but not too often. He could fuck off. I loved Lily, she loved me, that was that. And he was a bastard anyway, whose little ‘slut’ comment still meant I owed him a punch in the face (moot will no longer wish to be the little girl before I punch someone in the face, though).

I graduated from college. I wore the hat and the robe and got the piece of paper that certified me as not being totally stupid. Shockingly my father made it to the ceremony which served to make it unpleasant for both of us.

One standard “whoo I am young and white” month of traveling and enjoying life before I entered the mind-numbing world of business later, I entered the mind-numbing world of business. Things slowed with Lily, she was out of school around when I got back (while traveling the time zones were a disaster, we settled for a few emails here and there), and I didn’t want to be impeding her summer.

There was no way I was going to see her that summer which was definitely a disappointment for me. I wanted to see her very much but it siplmy was not going to happen. Sadface.

So I worked. She also traveled a little bit, got pretty tan, …showed her tan lines to me via Skype on a handful of occasions. I wanted to have my arms around her, hands on her side, feeling those curves, feeling her move beneath (oops) above me… My love wasn’t quite obsession, I wasn’t looking at her face every two minutes or building a life-size doll of her in my bedroom, but it was certainly in the neighborhood.

Again, I tried not to be overbearing. It was difficult. We were about half and half in initiating contact, so don’t think I was going quite that far. Just almost.

Here, let’s go into a long discussion of my job. I am sure it will interest you. So supervising supply chains and local management teams is

Oops, I fell asleep just like all of you did. None of us care about that. Though be aware that it instantly was 75% of my life, time will likely appear to start moving a little quicker in the story as axing out the work stuff leaves us with Relevant Material that swiftly leaps across a span of time.

What was I even trying to say in that paragraph?

Things were much the same.

I’ll be honest, by October I was getting bored of it. Long distance sucks and I doubt Lily was feeling quite as enthused to hear me say “I love you” before hanging up on Skype for the five hundredth time. We wanted to be with each other. Fortunately I was no longer hampered by a school schedule and thus started to plan out another winter trip. January would mark a year since I had seen her so I shot for a little before then. A year was too long. Eleven months was so much better! December it was.

No surprise this time around, I told her on her 18th birthday and we had a small celebration together. We both marked the day on our calendar, checking off the days like a little boy during Ramadan (maybe that was just me). I arranged it with the home office so I’d take care of some stuff down there. The zero administrative resistance I encountered started to clue me in on how non-important location was for my job. Yeah, I’d be seeing Lily’s dad every day as usual, this time with a lot more forced interaction. Being colleagues would hopefully mean he could leave his personal emotions at the door (of course I knew I couldn’t, lolololol).

The next reunion, finally here! I hope you are as happy as me, as happy as I was to finally have her back. I am not sure how she finagled it, but Lily managed to meet up with me my very first day on the ground — perhaps her father had managed to understand that being 18 does not mean you are secretly 8.

As before, we did not run to a hotel to dive into one another, but we met outside a restaurant. Seeing her get out of her car…same hair, same body, same everything I loved about my Lily. She was wearing a rather mature outfit, a blouse with jeans, and I felt the old pants demon stirring as I considered unbuttoning it. (hi welcome to a guy’s mind, it is ugly in here)

Huge hug. We wrapped around one another, pulled our heads away to reposition for a kiss. She felt almost fragile, light as ever, her head not really fitting beneath mine like it had once so long ago, but still shorter. Again, the kiss was managed despite her height. It makes me laugh to look back at when she first had that concern - being too short to kiss me. Seems like eons ago.

We ate dinner and talked. Lily knew how unenthused I was about my work, and prodded about why I was bothering with it. This was the first time (other than drunk college bros) that someone had actually pinned me to the wall with the facts as I presented them — I hated what I was doing, didn’t want to do it, etc. So why was I doing it? This wasn’t our first conversation but close to it and damn she had a point. Why was I doing it if I truly did not want to?

A part of me wanted to, that much was clear. Lily got me to admit it. I felt a little sick saying it after all the ‘fight’ I had put up, as you saw in this story. She seemed satisfied once I said it.

“I don’t want you to always be unhappy with where you are.”

Either she’d accidentally eaten a book of morals or was some kind of swami. I appreciated it, though.

We moved on to talking about her. These conversations happened over the course of a multi-week visit, but for the sake of story I’m condensing them to here. She wanted to attend an American college and study psychology. Lily’s hope was to attend a really excellent program, preferably Ivy League. This matched up nicely enough with my geography, and plus there is something sort of hot about someone that driven. I encouraged as best I could. When I asked what drove her towards that field she just said she thought it was really interesting learning about how people think and what made them think that way. Shit. Smart girl. In high school they’d touched upon some of those subjects briefly and Lily had always found that fascinating.

I hoped she’d be able to identify what was wrong with my brain, though I figured waiting until she had her Master’s degree would be essential for her to not be overwhelmed.

Work was what I expected. I was irate as soon as I saw Lily’s dad, of course, and maybe he was angry too but just more of a badass alpha. I don’t even lift you guys, of course her dad was better than me.

We managed to keep it professional and just did our work. I felt 1% more inspired to try after my talk with Lily, and her dad seemed weirdly accepting of me taking on a few of his responsibilities as a ‘trial’. He is not an old bastard, just a pretty old bastard, so accepting retirement did not seem like it was his style. Maybe it was?

The hiding was minimal this time around. She still had school so we had to work around that schedule (though I worked at almost the same hours), but there was not nearly as much sneaking. We were in a relationship and I, for one, wasn’t going to act like I was ashamed of it or her.

This meant for the first time ever we walked down the street, and in a park (not that one), holding hands. We’d held hands before plenty, but never in public, never where everyone could see us. I loved it - two foreigners, one attractive and one faggot OP, attracted just the right amount of attention. I ate it up, though I think Lily was used to the stares and either did not notice them or pretended not to.

I just liked having her hand in mine. I liked the swaying motion in our arms as we matched our pace to one another. It was… It was something. We’d kissed, had sex, done many things. But each ‘new thing’, even as simple as holding hands, reminded me all over again how great it was to be in love, specifically in love with her. With Lily.

And yeah, there was sex, not that you need it confirmed I don’t think. Ah, okay fine, you’ve been reading for a while, I’ll indulge you.

We experimented with oral for the first time. Well, I tried to. She didn’t want me to go ‘down there’ on her, pushing away my attempts a couple times until I agreed not to do it. “but how will I become expert so Khia will love me” I said sadly. However doing things on partner does not like in bed is a recipe for the worst relationship, so I let it be.

Then she said she’d give it a shot. AWWWRIGHT ANONS GET YOUR ENGINES STARTED

I lay on my back while she scooted down the bed, perpendicular to my side, bending over and brushing her hair behind her ear while she get herself in the…proper spot. Just the flick of the hair behind the ear was almost enough for me to lose it. Fortunately I did not but goddamn. Soon her mouth was on me, not really ‘engulfing’ so much as teasing up and down the sides, her tongue a rough little devil that was far too stimulating. After a little bit of this play she moved and held my level 9000 mega-boner upwards and brought her mouth over it. I don’t know how many of you have seen a girl’s cheeks puff out when she gives oral but shiiiiit. That moment happened. It was my first time getting oral and her first time giving so I can’t say if it was excellent or poor or whatever, all I know is it got me off like crazy. When she was finished I attempted to move towards her again, got rejected again. We cuddled until I felt up for more and then had sex the normal way, her on top.

This happened a handful more times throughout the trip. Not the oral - that was a one-time thing, I figured if she was not into it then I was not going to be into it either. Though I was into it. But really, sex is sex and it all felt pretty good to me.

(Sorry, if you’re holding onto your orgasm for an anal scene, there is not one coming)

The timeline for me taking over her father’s job was not a straightforward thing. I needed (wanted) more training and preparation before becoming a higher-manager, and taking over his job just felt like overkill for the new kid on the block. The trip ended, Lily and I did not cry this time, just clung to each other for a few minutes in the hotel lobby before I headed up up and away.

That summer she went off on her own little ‘trip’ after high school, cutting off our contact for a decent amount of time. We met up in my home city and went to a few nice places, enjoyed a museum or two, in general were a Very Classy Pair of Dicks. I loved every second, at least every second her hand was in mine, or every time we kissed in front of a particularly memorable backdrop. It was perfect.

She entered college a few states away in the fall, and this meant we could -gasp- meet up on weekends! Have regular dates! Have sleepovers! Real life was starting and I was in the perfect position. Maybe her friends weren’t chill with her graduate boyfriend but I know I was.

Lily got into college full-bore. She was in clubs, doing excellent academically, and presumably beating away suitors with a stick. Or so I hoped. Guys in college preying on freshman girls are usually pretty skilled, but I figured Lily was not quite that dumb. Nah, I knew she wasn’t dumb. I still managed to get nervous every now and then.

With the ability to see each other frequently suddenly in place, our long-distance communication dropped down to frequent texts, the rest mostly forgotten. I wanted her to focus on studying and she wanted to focus on studying and that worked. We had a couple months of nearly-every-weekend dates and one night at my place for about every two dates. Figure out that math problem if you are bored by the fact that I am writing at the speed of Half Life 3’s development.

Annnnd…now it was my turn to be the one in South America. I flew down there for another month-long thing, though again it seemed like I’d be perfectly capable of doing it without traveling at all. “the world is flat guyz”.

We went back to some Skype and chatting and finally Facebook as she entered the 21st century like a normal human. The day we confirmed our relationship status, and I finally added a name to mine, on Facebook felt special. Though really not nearly as momentus as I thought it might have been — I guess digital confirmation of something so physically real ends up meaning nothing.

At the office life was the same for the most part until DRAMATIC TURN.

Lily’s dad had a heart attack. He was a pretty highstrung dickhole, which we’ve all come to learn. Not really the biggest shocker in the world, it was more a shock that his clogged-ass arteries made it as far as they did. It seemed like he’d be fine (it happened at home, as much as I’d like to write about him dropping in front of my desk) but then like the way most things go he wasn’t fine. He was dead in a couple days.

My ding-dong the witch is dead party felt poorly timed so I threw it just for myself. I mean…he was okay. No one deserves to be dead, at least at a relatively young age. I called Lily about when she’d arrive for the funeral, which was being held down there since I guess his family either hated him as much as me or carting his fat ass to America was too expensive. She was actually hesitant, saying she had told her mom she might not make it. I tried to convince her otherwise - dad’s funeral, dude. You kind of have to go to that. Even I intended to attend my own dad’s.

It was my first time seeing Lily’s mother and sister in a very long time. I figured they knew and/or suspected things between myself and Lily, and when I arrived Lily actually held my hand in front of them. So whether or not they had an idea before they certainly did now. I tried not to look as uncomfortable as I felt, gave them my condolences, ran far away.

Her mother accepted my words coldly. Lily’s sister actually glared at me, pants-shittingly terrifying with her black dress and ice queen face. No hissed words though or things to obsess over.

So, of course, it came later at dinner with Lily (who abandoned her family in favor of me, which I argued against…but). She said that they were convinced we’d been together for a very long time and they thought my appearance in the office had pushed him past the edge.

They thought I killed him.

wat.

Definitely made me think. He seemed really calm with me and hadn’t brought it up at all, why the hell… Would they think that? Maybe he fell into his own Rube Goldberg machine he’d create to kill me and it’d destroyed its maker. Maybe something slightly more convoluted. Did I kill a guy?

Fuck.

So that makes me feel no good. I went back to the home office almost immediately while another manager took over. Yeah, good job, OP.

Time carried on.

And now we hit the home stretch of our tale.

Lily and I met for dinner, as usual, near-ish to my home in order to allow for potential post-dinner hijinks. Exciting for me, exciting for you, exciting for everyone! Lily seemed somewhat more subdued during the meal, not talking too much, mentioning classes and grades and a few friends. While freshman year usually isn’t where you get to do too much studying within your field of interest, she did have one psych class that really interested her, but even this wasn’t getting a normal amount of conversation out of her.

Eh, maybe a bad day. I didn’t want to push it and irritate her, so I tried to let it go. Obviously asking what was wrong was burning in my head, but I waited until we had finished eating. Or maybe I waited one second because I was concerned and impatient.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

Of course. I prodded but got nowhere. I asked if she wanted to go to mine, and she said yeah, but she wanted to talk and sleep, she just wasn’t in the mood. Disappoint OP was disappoint but understood that sex is not a given every time.

Still, though.


 * _;

The brick wall I was heading towards was not yet on my radar but maybe it should have been. We went to my apartment after a brief, quiet drive, listening to old M83 because I am a faggot as I’ve said thirty plus times throughout this story.

Once we were seated on my couch we spooned as comfortably as possible. Or rather I started to initiate that before she shrunk away. We sat across from each other.

Now my spidey-sense was tingling, far later than it should have been.

A story started tumbling out. This is what I had not planned on sharing and yet here I am sharing it anyway.

She hated her dad. He was a pig. I said I did not like mine either, he was basically a wall that sometimes would spit money at me but usually make me look for a door.

And out it came. Maybe this was totally expected from what everyone has been saying, maybe not. I don’t know. I did not expect it at all.

Lily’s dad had molested her. Just writing it makes me want to die, perhaps just so when I go to Hell I can kill him again. It had happened over the course of four or five years, from when she was 9 onwards. And yeah, immediately I realized the crossover between these two sordid stories.

I’d been part of this.

So many little things made sense now, so, so many, from throughout the entire history of our relationship. Him calling her a slut, her not wanting me to touch her…and tons of other small details, right down to the fact that she had shaved her barely-there pubic hair.

Her dad.

I had no idea what to say. Even now, a couple years later, I don’t know what I could have said. I backed away from her slightly, not wanting to force my touch on her, suddenly regretting the attempted spooning from earlier.

And I regretted trying to give her oral. And touching her to try and get her ‘excited’. And…taking her virginity. Fucking her when she was 13. Trying to when she was 12.

It all fell into stark contrast. I wondered what she walked back home to when we had finished when she was 13. What had it been like?

It felt like the world was collapsing.

"Lily. I’m…sorry."

That’s what I settled on. She was crying, ugly crying, huge gulping sobs and I was following suit though not quite as broken-heartedly.

"You’re the first person I’ve told. The first…person."

I had to move forward, I did, I took her hand. “Lily.”

She let me hold her hand and didn’t say anything.

"I’m sorry." I said it again, feeling stupid, not knowing what else to say. Then we sat in complete silence. Who knows how long. I didn’t want to kiss her or hug her or do anything remotely physically romantic. I was terrified. I do not know how to deal with things like this and at that point it was much the same. I could just hold her hand and be there for her.

"I still love you."

Maybe it was thirty minutes, maybe ten hours, maybe ten seconds. But I said it. She did not respond, but she stood up and let her hand pull away from mine.

Lily walked out the door of my apartment.

I was left in horrified silence.

There were no words. There are no words for that moment. No face to post, no adjectives to describe. My world had been torn away from me and I was seeing it cast in a stark light that changed everything.

Fuck, you guys. Fuck.

I drank until I couldn’t drink any more that night. I drank through the next day. Didn’t bother trying to call in to work to tell them, just decided to say fuck it.

I drafted up a hundred texts to her and sent none of them. I wrote a long email and deleted it. I…did nothing.

Finally we were on Facebook at the same time. She messaged me first.

"I’m sorry."

I told her she had nothing to be sorry about, absolutely nothing. I should be apologizing, forever, for everything. I asked if…what I’d done..to..

"I wanted to have someone else who wasn’t him. You were that person. I…picked you."

Oh god. What about the little story about her being ten and loving me? About our loving conquering time and space? Age not mattering? The little things we’d said and shared and everything, how much was even real, how much was a girl trying to escape a horrible situation? I had no idea.

I was shattered even further.

She picked me. Did she want to have someone to love? Someone to give her virginity to? Did she ever care about me at all, or did she just want solace?

And then the worse thoughts… Was I meant to be solace and I turned it into sex? Was I just her second abuser, convincing her all men were sex-obsessed monsters?

Was I.

The same.

As him?

Could I ask her those questions, could I really? I doubted it very strongly. But I wondered, oh god I wondered and I tortured myself, finally telling work I needed all my vacation days ASAP, pulling away from my social life, looking inward and seeing myself as a dark, horrid monster.

But she was 18? We loved each other? I had plans for her 19th birthday, gifts and trips and all sorts of things. What had happened to us?

It took another day before I started to wonder - was it over?

We hadn’t talked in what felt like an eterniy. I was at the end of my rope emotionally. Something inside me had been broken by this entire saga and maybe I had once thought it’d all be fine…but deep down I had to have known it would all come crumbling down. Now that it had, I had nothing and no one.

No one.

And who did Lily have? I thought she had me, she still could, but where was she? Was I meant to reach out? I tried again.

"I didn’t mean to hurt you, Lily. I didn’t want to…"

It sounded so stupid.

"What can I do for you? Please. Let me."

"I need space, OP. We can talk later. We will, I promise."

So I gave her what she wanted. I let her be. I waited. I got a horrible reputation at work, not that I cared, and I started drinking more than I have before in my life. It took away some of the pain, turned it into numbness.

What had I done?

I do not know how much time passed. It was the end of the semester, Lily had turned 19 and I had done nothing for her, let tickets go unused.

My personal email bing-bonged which was abnormal. It was from Lily.

“Hey. Thanks for letting me talk to you. I’m sorry but I thought I needed to tell you about it and I know things can’t be the same now. I’m not sure how to move forward but we’ll both figure it out. I don’t regret it but I wish things between us had been different. I care about you. Lily.”

She cared about me. No love, no regrets though a wish things had been different. I read between the lines as much as I could but no further meaning seemed to be presenting itself. I waited a few days before replying.

I would try to rewrite it here but there’s no reason. It bounced back as an invalid inbox, and after checking her address I tried again and got the same error. After months without Facebook I logged on, seeing I was back to “in a relationship” with no person attached. Her profile was gone.

Her Skype was offline. She may have received my worried “Hey, are you okay?” texts but she did not reply. All our normal routes of contact were broken off. I called her school, obviously they can’t reveal information like that to some random guy.

The sinking feeling turned into a sense of falling. So much of who I was had been defined by Lily, and without her I hardly knew what kind of a person I was without her by my side. She was gone. Lily was gone. I kept remembering it, kept drinking to try and dull the painful edges of the idea. I moved on to light drug usage, mostly Xanax. I just…wanted it to be over.

Some small, stupid part of me believed she’d come back to me. That was the part of me that started writing this story, the part that thought what we had was love. My fake ending nixed this part, just had us dating long-distance and having slightly difficult communication, I thought it’d make me feel good to write up a beautiful reunion.

Real life is not a romantic movie or story and at some point I figured that out. Maybe after I decided to start doing my job from afar, maybe after I left my apartment for a hotel. I searched for Lily’s name online every now and then in the first couple of months before realizing that was what her ‘abuser’ would do. I started to see myself like that. She wanted safety and I took advantage of it. Or had I? Sometimes I tried to believe in love. Was it ever love? Having never experienced it before Lily, I had nothing to compare it to. I could only wonder.

Everything…everything in this story takes on such a dark, ugly light with this revelation. I am disgusted by myself and what I’ve done and I do not think it was right.

Lily..

It was all for her. My everything was for her. And I’d ended up hurting her. And I’d even managed to fuck it up in my final moments with her when she left my apartment.

I relived those moments between pills and liquor. The self-flagellation was awful, I did everything I could to hurt myself, try to feel the pain I knew she had to be feeling, try to make myself pay.

Nothing would bring her back. What good was I without her?

Let’s move to present tense.

We’ve never communicated in any way since that day. I’ve tried a couple times but never got anywhere. She does not want to talk to me and I am reading into that exactly as far as I think I should. She had one abuser, tried to find a friend, and got a second abuser — one who went far, far further.

Lily is still out there somewhere. I have adjusted details about her to make finding her difficult, and as far as I know she keeps an extremely low profile online anyway. In writing this story I do not want to publicize her pain. She has gone through some horrible things. I contributed to them.

I do not deserve her and never did, I only ever convinced myself I did. But I don’t.

I took advantage of a hurting child. Or did I? Who knows how this will be taken, but I believe I did.

Lily will always be in my heart. I will never, ever find something like what we had. And the thought that what I thought was perfect love was something else from the start… I’ll never find that sort of happiness again, and deep down it was never even shared happiness. That is what it comes down to for me.

I am grateful for those who are sharing this story with me. This is my final tribute to Lily. She is a perfect woman, my perfect woman, and she deserves happiness and people far better than the men she has had in her life. Lily, if somehow you ever see this, I never stopped loving you.

Typing this through a haze of chemicals has been difficult, but we are now done. My email has been closed. My responsibilities will run smoothly for the next few days. This is my last post on 4chan. Goodbye.

And thus the Liliad ended. You can read the pastas, or just go have a drink or seven.