The Girlfriend Experience

Prologue

Rhiannon

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There is a knock on my door.

It's a soft caring knock. I know it's my mother checking up on me again but I can't move a muscle. She knocks again and after a moment, I hear the door creaks open.

"Rhi," she says. "I'm going to the store for a while. Do you want anything?"

I lay still on my bed, eyes glued to the ceiling. I can't utter a word to her, not one single word. I am currently experiencing an unbearable amount of pain, a pain that courses through my entire body, possessing me. It has taken my ability to talk and move.

After a long moment of silence, my mother realizes that she's not going to get anything out of me so she backs away slowly closing the door behind her. The streak of light that entered my room when she came in left along with her.

Everything is black again and it's not the kind of blackness that one ever wants to experience. It fills up my entire room, every corner, ever wall, the ceiling. I'm no stranger to it, I've been captured by this blackness for what feels like an eternity, since it happened. I ooze it. I've been spreading it everywhere I go, spilling it onto everyone I've come in contact with, and spewing it onto the boy who jabbed me in the heart.

My heart is my main source of function. When it's been played with, used by a boy who proclaimed to love it and stabbed it repeatedly by what felt like a sharp knife, it loses hope and meaning and it dies.

My heart is dead and so is everything else.

I wish there was a way to revive it, to make it better, stronger. I wish another boy could swoop in, heal it, and take away all the hurt he's caused. I wish I could turn back time to warn my heart about him.

I wish, I wish, I wish.

What I really wish for is for a bus to run him over and crush his heart. I wish he could experience the excruciating pain I'm going through right now. I wish he could see how he hurt me. The wound he left in me this morning is only getting deeper and deeper.

The only flashing thought going through my mind was the text he sent this morning.

"I don't want to hurt you but I have to end this. I have to end us."

He didn't even have the decency to face me in person. He didn't have an ounce of goodness left in his character to finish us face to face. This was another factor that hurt me, we had been together for nearly five years, not days, not weeks or months, years. Nearly five years that we both invested into this relationship. I gave myself to him, all of myself and the only way he could possibly think to break-up with me was over a text.

This was the purest, most hateful way to hurt someone you claimed to love. If he truly ever loved me, he would have never done this to me. I would never be in this state, on the brink of death, taken by darkness. Although the damage is done, I still can't come up with an answer as to why he did it. He left me with no explanation and all I wanted to know was why.

What could have happened to make him break us up?

What had changed?

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AN: the prologue is a little heavy but it'll get lighter as the book goes on. Promise.