Stephanie Gross, I have read your message to me over and over, trying to understand how you can go from “we’re boyfriend and girlfriend” in the space of a few hours to dumping me before you brush your teeth the next day.  You say you’ll try to rescue Krystle and get frustrated when she won’t help herself. But Krystle doesn’t want to be rescued. She wants to solve her own problems. You created this entire rescue scenario without asking anyone if rescue was needed. You’ve projected your pain with Chris onto someone you met twice.

You say the physical intensity between us is like a drug, like Chris and the copium you want. That’s EXACTLY why I didn’t have sex with you when you asked. I could feel you trying to use me as an escape valve, and I deliberately stopped us because I wanted to build something substantial, based on what a HEALTHY relationship might look like. If your fears had been real, I would have had no compunction about getting into your head, and making you into a submissive sex toy. I had every possible incentive to play you exactly the way Chris played you, by being the perfect man who takes away all your pain and thinking for a while. And I didn’t, because I KNEW IT WAS BAD FOR YOU.  Have Trevor and Chris had that much compunction about your own welfare?

I suppose this makes more sense if you were never really with me in that room. If that little calculator I could see running in your head the whole time was just computing escape routes and risk assessments while I was trying to actually connect with you.

So as far as I can tell, you’ve broken up with your own projections – your imagined rescue of Krystle, your fear of your own intensity, your need to stay safely miserable rather than risk something real. If that’s all you could see, then you never saw me at all.  I knew EXACTLY what you were afraid of.  I actively chose not to be that thing, even though you would have been mine as a result.  You are wrong to treat me as the thing I choose not to be.