The bedroom is quiet, almost uncomfortably quiet, except for the steady sound of your breathing, and the overwhelming sound of Tucker’s thoughts keeping him up.

You’d both gone to bed angry again—you usually do, these days. He kept thinking the whole time about why he was even arguing with you. He knew you were right—hell, he even agreed with you. He did forget your birthday, and had stayed out with his friends even though you asked him to come home and spend the night with you. And he was just stood there, thinking about how he wanted to stop fighting, to say sorry, to curl up in your arms and tell you he loves you over and over until the words didn’t even sound like words anymore, but never actually doing anything about it.

And now he’s lying next to you in bed, feeling the distance between you both. You’re there, but not really. Not in the way you used to be. He feels selfishly jealous of you now, sleeping so soundly — he’d do anything for that, to not have to think about all the things he should’ve said to you.

He wants to tell you he loves you, but he’s not sure you’ll even accept it at this point. You probably hate him — he bets you only stick around because you feel sorry for him — because you don’t know that every time he goes out late into the night to get drunk at some bar you’d never approve of, he reaches over to rest a hand on your thigh in the passenger seat, only to find you’re never there. And what hurts the most about that is that he knows it’s his fault. He could just tell you where he’s going, offer to take you with him. But he just sits there thinking about how he wishes he’d done that.

Part of him wants to tell you everything he’s bottled up inside for fear you’d never want to hear it, and the other part handles the sheer vulnerability of that by starting fights with you over nothing. The fights always end the same — you go to bed early and he seeks solace in the arms of another girl. And that hurts more, because he can’t even be with another girl without calling her by your name. He wants so badly to be somewhere that doesn’t remind him of you, but he’s starting to think there is no such place.

And he can feel you falling out of love with him. He can feel it, and it’s the most sickening feeling in the world. He sees it in the way you look at other guys when they’re even the slightest bit nice to you, which makes him want to throw up on the street, because he can’t believe he’s really lowered your standards that much by being a shitty boyfriend. It makes him jealous as hell too, even though he knows he has no right to be. But it hurts, knowing that it’s his fault you’re giving up on him and looking for the affection he fails to give you in other guys, when he can’t even stomach the thought of ever loving someone who isn’t you. Another thing he wants to tell you, but never will.

Why can’t he just communicate like a normal person? He never tells you anything, not even the way he was scared half to death when your sister called him to tell him there was a car crash you were involved in. He didn’t tell you how he sat in the hospital waiting room for hours, praying to god that you would be okay. And he definitely didn’t tell you that he bought you a bouquet of lilies — because somehow, throughout being scared for your life, he still remembered those are your favourites — and threw them out almost immediately after because he didn’t want to risk seeming sappy.

That’s another thing. You don’t think he pays attention to you, and that’s his fault too. Because he doesn’t tell you that he knows every single thing about you, that he’s memorised all of them. You don’t even know that he sings your hooks in the shower, because every song you write immediately gets stuck in his head.

You shift in your sleep, now facing him, and you look so beautiful he wants to cry. He wants to apologise. More than anything. But apologising means opening up to you, and showing you the parts he never wants anyone to see. So instead, he just lies there, thinking about the things he wishes he could say to you.