I told myself that I would not fall in love with him when I’d first seen him. I swore to myself that I would not even be interested in him as soon as I’d gotten to know him. His name was Asher and he was my brother’s upstairs neighbor. They had quickly become friends as my brother Taz just moved into the main floor apartment two weeks ago. I finally got permission from my mother and parole officer to live with him. I’d gotten myself into some deep trouble by being in the wrong place at the wrong time and viewed this change of scenery as a nice opportunity to escape the pit I’d fallen in.

I had a certain taste in men that I started to notice over time. A few main traits being red hair and a sense of immature humor. He had both. I fought my own moral compass daily whenever he came to visit. I just couldn’t help myself though. He was so attractive to me. He just had a newborn son with a girlfriend of 6 years though.

“Emry! The guy upstairs is coming down to hang for a bit. His names Asher. He’s pretty funny.” Taz said while setting the tv up for a movie. I adjusted myself on the couch feeling nervous about someone new coming to visit. Moments later, Asher walked into the living room taking the seat next to me on the couch.

He was tall and average in size, but I could feel his body heat when he brushed shoulders with me. His hoodie was soft and he smelled like fabric softener. It was so much nicer than the cheap body spray my brother wore all the time. His right eye was always shut. I wonder...

“So what happened to your eye?” I asked after his and Taz’s ridiculous insults. “I got shot when I was 19 with a BB gun. It ricocheted off a tree into my eye.” Asher explained. Taz started poking fun at him about how it was really poked out during a sausage fight. The conversation continued on in a pretty vulgar way after that. He was hilarious and cute.

By the time he went back upstairs I was already in love with him. I couldn’t sleep. My mind kept racing, thinking of him. I had class in the morning at my new school and I had to sleep. It never worked. I was exhausted when I got up the next day. My lab was in the morning, which kept me going and the instability of my new surroundings stirred my curiosity.

My first day of classes had finished and I’d taken the bus back home. I had to walk from my junior high to my brothers apartment. It wasn’t very far, but it was relaxing. Today when I’d made it home, Asher was outside by himself. “What you doing in there?” I asked as he was poking around in the garage. “Fixing my car. I’ve had this for a while, but it hasn’t run.” He answered looking over to me just under the brim of his ballcap.

Carrying a tool and few parts over to set under the hood, we started chatting. I had no clue what he was working on, but I stayed to at least pretend I was helping in hopes our conversation would get somewhere. While the weather was nice he would work on his car on his days off and drive deliveries for a pizza shop in the days when he worked. He also worked nights at a gas station, which is when I would talk to him the most. After a few weeks of living there, Asher and I had established a specific dynamic in our friendship.

He was very flirty with me as I was to him. He would say something absurd and it would turn into a wrestling match. The shenanigans never ceased between us. After a few more weeks had passed he offered to pay me for babysitting his son. We saw each other more often and soon became nearly inseparable.

We may have flirted, but things never went too far. He never let it since he was in a relationship and saw me as a kid sister. It was annoying! Months go by, winter comes and goes, and finally I have my summer vacation from school. Taz and Asher loved cooking out so we had a lot of picnics.

Picnics turned into parties and we all drank and had fun. There was one party that I remember very vividly. Everyone was outside doing their own thing while Asher and I were in the hall. We were fighting over something stupid when he’d pushed me against the wall. I thought it was his reaction to me pinching him for being a jerk, but he held my hands above my head with one hand and held himself up on the wall with the other. His face was only a few inches from mine.

I could feel his breath on my lips. I was nervous and I felt electricity coursing through my whole body. He’s held me there like that for a minute before letting me go. Someone had almost walked in on us like that. I pretended like it never happened and went on as usual. We couldn’t be acting awkward in front of others. They might get the wrong idea, but that was the moment I realized that I couldn’t hold it in anymore.

I was just getting back in touch with some of  my oldest friends. Some I couldn’t talk to anymore and one didn’t even go to public school anymore. Her name was Paige. She had been my best friend since we were maybe a year old. Her mother babysat me for the better part of my childhood and we went to elementary school together, too.

One day after my classes I asked her and her mother if it was ok for her to come hang out with me. Her mother was very particular who she could spend time with. She allowed Paige to come with me and this would be the point in my story that Paige met Asher as well. I was excited for Paige to meet Asher because I wanted to share someone that I loved and had fun with, with my best friend. They got along great! Paige and I had fun when she was over.

We tried different hair styles and toyed with makeup. We babysat Asher's son together and my newborn nephew. The whole house was harmonious. This was until the day that Paige expressed to me that she felt she might love Asher. My heart sunk and I felt like I was going to vomit. I never saw this coming.

My best friend, that I was so confident in, had become the source of my anxiety. We used to have fun when she came over, but now I only pretended to have fun while she spent her time trying to flirt with Asher. I was a third wheel and they made me feel ugly for it. She already had someone she loved. I couldn’t understand why she needed the one that I loved. I’m sure she’d known how I felt. Everyone knew how I felt. Did she really not notice or maybe she did and didn’t care?

My trust in her was being whittled away each time she walked through my door. At this point in time I started smoking and my drug use increased. I’d only smoked weed before, but now I was widening my range and taking various other things to distract myself. The flirting between Paige and Asher had gotten to the point that his long term girlfriend had left him and my brother and his family moved from the apartment.

I refused to go home and live with my mother again, so Paige took me in. I felt like leaving that apartment was a way for Paige and I to revive our friendship. I was still babysitting for Asher after my classes, but I didn’t know that Paige was seeing him while I was at school. She’d told me about it after a few months. She even followed up that information with what they would do. She explained to me how he would touch her and how that made her feel.

I wanted to destroy her. I wanted to emotionally demolish her. She had stolen him from me. She had her person that she loved and it didn’t work out so she took away someone that I loved. I never tried to separate him from his girlfriend. I understood my boundaries, but she came in and shredded everyone's peace. She manipulated and tainted relationships. She got what she wanted in the end.

Slowly our friendship had become less bonded and we grew tired of each other. I started focusing on my friends from school instead. Most weekends I would leave to go to a friends house for parties and come home for school. I was fucked up all the time. I didn’t care, I was having fun and taking life by my own terms.

I decided to forget about Asher and Paige. I still hung out with Paige, but quit visiting Asher or even babysitting his son. I started dating a classmate instead. That lasted a whole month. Then afterwards I dated his friend that I met at a party. His name was James.

I was just getting to know James when my second brother Jon and his friend Lewis had taken me with them to Florida. It was my summer vacation again and they wanted me to come spend time with them. I had such an amazing time down there, except I missed my boyfriend. We talked every night on the phone though.

He’d become my best friend and helped me forget the anguish that Asher had brought me. Then I came home for school again and things began changing. James was my best friend until he started talking to his ex again. Until he started talking about what he wanted to do with other women. Again, that feeling of anguish came back. I tolerated for so long until I left him. James was no good. I moved out of Paige's house shortly after the school year started and moved back into my mothers house.

I’d been living at my mothers house for about a month when Asher texted me to see how I was doing. I felt my heart racing and the excitement of him talking to me was beaming from my whole body. He would come around to visit me a couple days a week and our friendship started to feel like it did when I first fell in love with him. He had moved and switched jobs. He was doing good in life. Then he called and asked if I wanted to hang out. He wanted to take me out and meet his friend that he was living with now. I had no idea what was going to happen that night.

Thinking about it now, I shouldn’t have gone that night, but I did. Asher picked me up in the evening. It was just between an average persons dinner and bed time. Not much of a plutonic date could happen then. Though, we did meet up with his friend that he lived with and watched a movie together with him.

His name was Tim. After this movie we all stepped into the garage for a smoke. Tim left and went to bed only a few minutes after lighting his cigarette, leaving Asher and I on our own. We smoked in a calm silence until Asher started talking about what things were like here in his new place. He sounded so refreshed.

After chatting for a bit we moved to his room. I can’t remember much now if he even intended to take me home that night, but I didn’t.

I stayed. It was like a long term fantasy come true. I’d plopped myself on his bed in a playful way. Really, I was just seeing how comfortable his bed was since he had just bought it less than a month ago. I reached and felt the quilted leather headboard, slightly cool from the lack of heat in his room. He turned the tv on and sat down on the foot of the bed.

The atmosphere of the room was thick. It was clear, but thick with anticipation. I’m not sure if the anticipation was just my own, but he shut the light off and laid down on his bed with his hands up behind his head. He acted as though he didn’t have any other intentions until I sat next to him Indian style...in the dark. I pretended like I was focused on the tv, all the while I was freaking out inside my head.

My heart was racing and I wasn’t really sure what was going to happen next. He wasn’t really silent the whole time. He brought up random subjects to avoid the mood from going stale. Suddenly, he sat up and gently grasped his left hand behind my neck, kissing me like he’d waited for years. I kissed back the same way, losing myself in my own desires.

Not even skipping a beat with his tongue in my mouth, he slipped my hoodie from my shoulders and slid his hand up my shirt. I grasped onto his chest, then reach up to wrap myself around him sitting on the bed. He swiftly unsnapped my bra and removed it with my t-shirt. I was now straddled on his lap, shirtless, while he wrapped his arms around my hips. I hugged against him with my arms around his broad shoulders, knocked his hat from his head and ran my fingers through the tufts of red hair that had been flattened from his ballcap.

I kissed him again. He changed his position and laid me on the bed underneath of him in one smooth motion. Kissing me like he’s been starved and myself matching his pace. I’d lost myself entirely to him. The events of the evening, now, are like photographic moments in my head and the feelings I had in those moments. The color of the room with the lights off and how it felt when he first touched me. First penetrated me like our bodies and souls were one. The flow and ecstasy.

Unfortunately, the next morning I woke up with the worst cramps of my life. My period was pissed or he was bigger than I realized. I stayed with him for the better part of the next day. We spent time with his friend Tim and lounged in the living room. The air felt weird.

Asher acted like nothing had even happened. He acted like I was a side note, which is the last thing I had expected after the night we just had. I took the hints and acted the same. I didn’t want to feel like a fool any more than I already did. Later in the evening he took me home and went on his way.

Despite the way he treated me throughout the day, I was still enlightened by the night before. It made my heart flutter and I couldn’t believe that after nearly two years and all of the problems we had, that this would happen. I didn’t hear from him for a few days after this. He finally stopped by towards the end of the week, but still acted like nothing happened. I was starting to get a bad feeling from it.

I think he began to notice this because he asked me out again. We never went anywhere on dates. I was two months shy of my eighteenth birthday and he was 26, so thinking of it now, he might have been ashamed or simply waiting. Either way, I loved being with him and never cared to notice much else. I was naïve.

Shortly after I started seeing Asher, my brother Taz came home from Maine. His fiancé and mother of his youngest son was cheating on him. He rented out a cheap motel room and lived there for a while. Asher and I would come visit from time to time and I think Taz picked up on a vibe. Taz was in a terrible spot in life and he hated that his best friend was involved with his sister.

Taz told me that he didn’t want me to date his friend, but I ignored it thinking he was just jealous that I’d stolen Asher from him. I still don’t know if that was the case. I did however tell Paige that Asher and I were dating. She didn’t give much reaction to hearing that. I knew he was just a fling to her, so I didn’t see any reason to not go after him.

I didn’t realize then what all of these reactions truly meant. I was so happy living in my own dream that I never noticed what was going on behind my back.