The Cardshark.

It was fine.

The loss tasted sour, but it was fine. The new habits, the misery, the faded lines, and the outmoded clothes. The lost reputation and the great humiliation. The new beginning and the closed chapters. All was fine; all was bearable.

When she came into my life, that was how everything felt. Fine. Tolerable, even acceptable, and God knows I wasn't the accepting type of man. But I guess one could change. All that was needed for said change to occur was the push to climb another rock when the one you were standing on lost its strength and rolled off the mountain. After all, it was all about reaching the summit. The how didn't matter. It's not like you swore allegiance to the route. Heck, the mountain itself never pledged loyalty to the climber who risked his life just to stand on its highest point and drown it in declarations of love and vows better suited to church and a partner who reciprocates those feelings. But that's the problem with mountain climbers. They didn't care about reciprocity, they loved one-sidedly and fiercely, wearing their love in their bodies with tattoos to compensate for the confessions they never heard from a mountain they had climbed before.

But see, this whole relationship is fucked up in its own way. The mountain never returned the love, and the mountaineer was never faithful to one love. One day he was in love with Annapurna, another with Mount Denali, but deep in his heart his greatest love was for Everest. What about the unattainable and the push and pull and all that blah blah. I can testify to that. I was a mountaineer myself. I wouldn't say I was at a professional level, but I did a good job and earned a good reputation. However, even though I cheated on many mountains, I cherished them equally in my heart and body. I wore their names on my ribs until one day a possessive mountain, who obviously didn't like polygamy, decided to write its name on my body - with blood and cuts and a fall that put me in the hospital for organ failure due to excessive blood loss.

I survived the fall, but the cost was enormous. I survived the fall, but my sister did not survive her designated type of fall. I survived the fall because, ironically, my sister fell on the same day as me. I survived the fall because even though my sister deliberately drove herself to an untimely death, her kidneys, unlike mine, didn't stop working, even though her brain did. So I survived, and so did her kidneys, but she didn't.

Now, though, I wondered if someone would be willing to save me in the same way and give me a heart, because mine tore at the line my own kidneys had walked. The line of failure. It was speeding up and then slowing down —no doubt the first signs of cardiac arrest — and I wondered if disappointment could have the same consequences as falling off a mountain.

This shit wasn't in my plans this morning as I showered with cold water and swapped the ugly-ass blue jumpsuit for my faded jeans and t-shirt. The plan was to go home and drown in her sweet pussy for hours on end. To inhale her scent and come alive with it, not to die—ironically, and fuck irony yet again—by her naked sight on giant billboards all over this fucking city.

"God, Yoongi, I've missed you so much." She said, and the feeling was mutual. So much so that I found it hard to pull away from the embrace, even though I feared breaking her ribs with the intensity of my hug. Inaya smelled of lavender and sweet promises, which had always made it almost impossible for me to stay away from her. She smelled like peace, and God only knows how much I needed peace — peace from my guilty conscience that wouldn't stop berating me for being alive while my sister was dead before she could hear her son's first words. When his first word was mom, the guilt blossomed into a poison ivy that snaked around my chest and tugged hard. Her wrong choices sought to punish me instead, becoming fangs that ripped my chest into tiny pieces that Inaya could barely stitch together. Granted, the stitches were loose and barely held my heart together, but I survived, yet another time, painfully, but hey, what matters is the result.

Now, however, the stitches were torn. Drip, drip, drip. The blood was bound to stain the floor.

But before the bleeding started, I had the chance to kiss those rosy, plump lips and taste the sweet flavor of belonging and reciprocated love that the mountains couldn't provide. "I've missed you too, baby." I kissed her eyes—those deep hazels that were my anchor, my path to normalcy and acceptance and a fucked up new life I wouldn't have survived if not with her. If not for him.

When we walked away from that damned prison, I didn't know that our steps would lead us to quarrels, problems, and a plethora of changes. When we stopped not at the bus stop, but in front of a car we certainly couldn't afford, I didn't know that the euphoric spell would burst like a balloon and float away, far away from our grasp.

There was this kind of omniscient feeling that had been lurking under my skin ever since I found out a few weeks ago that Inaya had somehow managed to raise the money for my bail. It seemed unbelievable and far removed from our reality that she could raise such a large sum. After all, the judge wasn't squeamish. He went all out in my case, keen to make an example of me. In the eyes of unknowing people, I looked like the scumbag who had attacked the harmless old geezer who was just trying to run his little coffee shop. I seemed like a hoodlum — a very bad and cheap hoodlum in cheap clothes who needed money to pay for his next drug binge. A despised bully who was young and instead of using his youth for something useful, attacked a senior citizen for sport. That's why I didn't particularly blame the judge when he decided on my bail. Hell, even to my own eyes, I looked like a bastard using his strength against a weak opponent. The typical douche. But there was no regret in my heart. I'd probably finish the job if I saw that motherfucker again. He'd messed with the wrong person — the person I valued more than freedom, life, and my useless existence.

I couldn't forget for a second what her skin looked like when I finally persuaded her to take her shirt off. I was drunk, and she was there, as always, nursing my drunkenness with a smile gracing her beautiful face. She kissed me. I kissed her back. She touched me. I touched her too. And like a fuse meeting water, we shot off. The kisses turned into moans and I needed to feel her skin. It had been a few days since she started making all sorts of excuses to keep wearing her shirt during sex, and it was starting to get on my nerves. So I snuck my way into taking that fucking shirt off. When my eyes met her bruised skin, I sobered up, and not in a fun way. That sight haunted me even after I'd smashed that ugly old bastard while I counted the days behind bars.

This omniscient feeling intensified when I asked my friend Jungkook about Inaya during one of the rare phone calls I was allowed to make in prison. He changed the subject and inquired about my well-being, but I didn't care much at the time because I thought it was normal for him to worry about the friend in prison than to pick up interest in the girlfriend. Jungkook knew very well that I was capable of capital murder when it came to Inaya. He'd better steer clear from her, and apparently he was doing a good job of it. But as with all things mystery, time solved the riddle. Now the answers came to the questions, and doubt gave way to conviction.

Now everything made sense. Why she had skipped the visits and the half-hearted excuses she gave when I called her to find out why she hadn't come. How she kept promising that she would find a way to get me out of jail with a conviction that didn't seem like empty words of comfort. I used to think she was trying to reassure me and didn't make much of it, but now, as I stood frozen in front of the giant billboard where she posed in a swimsuit that barely covered her modesty, it all made perfect sense. Inaya had sold herself to buy my freedom, and God, how I wished I could return this pruchase and demand a refund.

Everything was normal, or so I liked to believe until we reached the last intersection before the highway. Not even the car bothered me. I bought the miserable explanation she provided and grinned at her like the village's foul. She said it was the company car and I bought it. Why? Because I was a wanker who had just got out of prison and missed his woman beyond belief and, above all because I was a man who trusted his woman fully. Blindly. Inaya never gave me any reason to doubt her intentions or her fidelity. She was respectful, loving and always honest with me. And the same applied to me, even though I was a real pain in her ass, I'd admit. The typical case of a man who, at the ripe old age of thirty-three, turned into a troublemaker teenager just to get back at life.

I ran my hand over my face and tugged at my hair as I squatted down in front of the billboard. My chest heaved and my breaths became so shallow I thought they would cease. Inaya stood a few feet behind me, and I believed she was keeping her distance to make sure she was spared my rage. I could hear her whimpering and her muffled cries. I could hear the traffic going by, people going on with their lives while mine seemed to stand still. I could hear my rapid breathing and feel the heat of anger and the unsettling sense of injustice pouring out of my pores in waves. Such a fucked up life and twisted irony.

Fuck you too, irony.

"I can explain, Yoongi. If you just listen to me, I promise I can explain."

"Explain what?" I stood up and turned to look at her, even though the sight of her pained me to a point, it was as if daggers were piercing my chest. I didn't blame her, and that hurt me the most. I blamed myself and the way life had turned her back on me. I blamed myself for making her find solutions to my problems when I should be taking care of her and protecting her. But God, I was feeling vindictive and sour and had to direct my anger somewhere, knowing that I couldn't direct it at life simply because she wouldn't give a single fuck about me or my feelings. It was low, but it seemed like I'd already reached my lowest. Would it make a difference if I stopped digging now? "Do you want to explain how you sold yourself out? Because if that's what you're going to tell me, then color me uninterested, Inaya." I closed the small distance between us and stood so close that I smelled her devastation—so close that her pained expression rubbed off on me, adding to my self-loathing. "You should have known better." With those words, I walked away, wanting to flee this moment, this country and her, when her words stopped my steps.

"I did it for us, can't you see?" Her words were loud, sounded desperate and smelled of misery. And I wouldn't lie and say that they didn't rattle me even more. So I turned around and shouted just as loudly as she did, which piqued the interest of passers-by. "And since when do we do things without consulting each other, Inaya? Don't you dare put this on me, because I sure as hell never asked you to whore yourself for me." The word hit the air, sharp and vile. And I saw it. I saw the shock. I saw the pain as it settled in her eyes, and it was as if I were plunging a knife into my own chest.

Yes, I had sunk that low. Yes. I was that type of douche, and yes, I hated myself and the word I'd spoken as soon as it left my mouth. God, I was digging my grave and I couldn't find it in me to stop because I couldn't find it in me to live, to begin with. My sister's guilt was already weighing on my shoulders, I couldn't deal with the fact that my girlfriend's dreams were vanishing into thin air to make way for my freedom, which if I could, I would give up upon if it meant undoing what had happened. This wasn't the life Inaya wanted. Inaya wanted a chance to be taken seriously so that she could pursue her dream of becoming a civil engineer. She had just taken a shite over that dream.

We didn't live in a forgiving society. She knew that just as well as I did. And with my broken relationships and tarnished family reputation, I wouldn't be able to save the day and help her find a company that wouldn't take advantage of her now that the whole country knew her body morphology. It's a sad, misogynistic world we live in, and she has made herself prey in a world full of hungry wolves. If it was hard to get a chance before, it had now become impossible. And for what? For my fucking freedom.

For fuck's sake!

"Come again," she mumbled in disbelief. I turned around and resumed my walk away from her, and her fancy car, and the giant billboard. But I was stopped again when her small hand grabbed my wrist and pulled me around so I could face her, and her tears, and her disappointed look. Just another dagger cutting into my heart.

I abruptly yanked my hand from her grasp, shaking her balance. "Whored myself out? Is that how you see it? Is that what I look like to you? A whore?" She straightened up, wiped her tears, though others ran down as soon as she retrieved her trembling hands, and fuck! I wanted to pull her close, hug her and apologize until the word was wiped out of her mind. But I couldn't, and that made me hate myself even more. Because I was just like this shitty society. A hypocritical, ungrateful asshole whose jealousy and anger clouded his vision. "Why, Yoongi, you're welcome. You shouldn't be thanking someone who had whored herself to give you your freedom back. But on a second thought, you're right. A whore should've minded her own business. But it's never too late, I guess. Enjoy your whore-free life." And now, she was the one who turned around, reached her car, and plunged into traffic without looking back.

Fuck me.

Double update 'cause it's my birthday!!!! so make sure to vote and comment xx.