You only live once sexy custom resort wear

The moment I realised I can only live once I did as I Damn well please! …

University Avenue runs long and cuts from Summer Street to South Street. At most, it’s 30 miles. It is occupied by many residents. Renters contend with vinyl and metal siding. Stucco defines prosperous proprietors.
The alleys are narrow but wide enough for vagrants and vendors. One minute, they brace hasty hookups only to be patronized by waste collectors the next.
Tonight, Eden can’t be sure which is which. Each moment just weaves into the next.
Mia often steals into the ether of time. Life is too short, she says. You only live once.
Eden thinks overtime. No one really knows her. She isn’t really there, but she isn’t too far gone. Her heart feels like a secret. It weighs on her. It is too heavy to entrust to others although some haul pieces of the chambers.
Mia carries her fair share. She spent an hour matching her makeup to the dress she bought exclusively for tonight, a strapless number whose chiffon collar roves to her hair. Her wardrobe halos the vacant expression she agonized to perfect.
Men like women who look empty, she says, but not too empty. They need some juice to smooth the plunge.
On the other hand, the women Mia encounters like to be made to feel as if they are fulfilled.
Whatever ensues is a matter of time.
Everyone plays it cool only to bathe in cold sweats.
An hour passes.
No word from the soul of Mia’s dreams.
She tries to call.
Text.
No answer.
With how tightly Mia clenches her phone, Eden wonders how it doesn’t splinter in her grasp.
Finally, someone picks up.
But doesn’t say hello.
Mia cranes over the face of the receiver. The silence makes her ears twitch. Finally, she clicks off. Flecks of mascara char the fringe.
A minute later, her phone rings. The lure of past infusions is weightless. A deep timbre anchors her to the present.
It belongs to her lover’s better half.
Mia hangs up.
Eden looks to her own phone. She tucks it away. When something is out of sight, she can pretend it is negligible or impassive. Which is why she takes care to message several people each time she contacts John. The face of her phone is replete. He seldom sends or answers messages, so she devotes herself to other missives.
Black hair, warm ivory skin, an impish knit brow, and a small smile that draws Eden to artful eyes as she finds herself desperate to avoid them. Only for hers to land on his comely, venous hands.
To face this, she looks to other faces.
Wherever she goes, John finds places to lodge within: airy notes in earshot, charms which quiver in her line of sight, the frailty that mars her own reflection.
No matter where she looks, wanders, or how many loads of laundry she carries down, he claims every crook and crevice.
He lives in her.
Eden looks at Mia.
Eden sees the future.
Heartbreak is a deep well that she has fallen into, a cavern of sorrow and pain. Weeks ago, John threw in the towel. Eden struggled to climb out ever since. The walls of this well are steep and slippery. Every time she thinks to escape, she finds herself falling back down into its depths. The emptiness echoes around her, a constant reminder of what she’s lost.
What she’ll never have again.
What she never had.
What John doesn’t care for.
Never cared for.
Mere months before, he gave her a music box which played “You Light Up My Life” — only to pitch her into darkness whose shadows now swallow her whole. The melody echoes in her mind, a haunting, mournful sound, nascent of what once was. Its notes echo through the emptiness and mark the end long after the crank stops.
Eden has only herself to blame. She knew love could only hurt. After all, her life was littered with examples: family, friends, even strangers.
She should’ve known better.
She couldn’t help it.
Mia reaches for a Bacardí bottle to dull the pain. She takes a sip, hopes to drown her sorrow; but with each swallow, more grief washes over her. The rum brings scant relief as it only serves to deepen the wounds of her broken heart. In the end, the drink only serves to amplify the vicious cycle.
Eden used to think she was better, more dignified, as she sought solace in her studies, writing, and everyone mistook her weakness for strength.
Even John.
“It’s supposed to hurt,” Mia slurs. “But it’s supposed to teach you. There’s always a lesson.”
Eden swallows hard. “I’ll never learn.”
Well, that wasn’t all true.
John taught her that love is a desert, a barren wasteland, where she yearns for something more. The drought of affection left her parched. She still took great care to let him be.
Let words remain unsaid.
Let go of those unsent messages.
Live and let live as she made do with the cairns that quenched. She could live with that. Then, in the distance, she saw a glimmer of assurance, a promise of rainfall, because John would return. He is like a storm on the horizon, a shower that revives her heart and brings new life, an oasis in the midst of a dry and desolate land.
Now, Eden drowns in a sea of grief.
The world just keeps on turning.
“Maybe the lesson is that it’s better to be alone,” she mutters. “Everyone leaves.”
“They always do,” Mia nudges. “Even friends…I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you, Eden.”
“No, you’re not,” Eden smirks. “You’d do it all again for the right one if you had the chance.”
Mia giggles. “So would you.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
Somehow, Eden must find a way to break through the surface and reach the light above.
“It’s not even the relationship thing that gets me,” she admits. “What kills me is just thinking about him with someone else… Like a picture of him with all this happiness with someone else… Even if we’re friends, he’ll just leave me for someone else…somewhere else…”
“Of course, he’d leave you in the cold for someone else,” Mia shrugs. “I mean, would you be okay with the person you’re with and their ex being besties?”
“It’s not about that.”
“Then, what’s it about?”
Eden wants to tell Mia she’s afraid that John will leave her altogether, that everything they shared meant nothing.
That the thought of him with someone else cuts her to the core and this wound will not heal.
That his memory endows more anguish than gratitude as it stings of a love that is one-sided, a love that once was and will never be again.
That she clings to frailty, hoping that he might stay or come around, that the fear of loss overshadows.
That she recedes into a darkness that chars her heart and is afraid to face a future without him.
That she will one day be the other woman, a shadow of love cast aside, consumed like a flame knowing he is not truly hers but is too proud to be extinguished.
That she is taken by a tale wherein love defines the story — only to discover she was nothing more than a footnote in his.
That she finds herself torn between desire and conquest as a pawn in the game of love.
That she will become the other woman who knows love is a crueler mistress, because love is a thief that steals into its devotees.
Instead, Eden just shrugs. “I don’t know.”

Pride has the best of Eden. Her heart rages inside her rib cage with the arrogance of someone who shrinks from the future.
John never loved her.
He never will.
No matter how hard she wishes.
Tries.
Cries.
All John can do is burn. She wanders the desert, searching for a merry morsel, a tender drop to revive her wary spirit. But all she finds is a despair that sprawls well into the horizon and tumbleweeds where she once flourished. John is a mirage that reminds her of what once was.
What he never felt.
What she imagined.
Even in this wasteland, Eden clings to the hope that she may someday find some loving refuge and she will thrive again. All this heat humbles her. She must kneel although she aspires for reign.
Tonight, John indulges her.
One of the benefits of friendship.
How long will this last?
Although John had always been warm, Eden always suspected he never loved her. She just never expected him to admit it. Especially after how much he praised her for being strong, driven, determined. This gave her hope they would last because she was the strong one, the one who would never say goodbye; that he was too weak to muster goodbyes.
But he did.
Somewhat tearfully.
Ultimately, unmoved.
Deadpan, she mused about life without him: space that would grow between them, want that would gnaw at her nerves, the chills that already tear through her as he dispels the warmth she imagined; the acuity with which he shrugs off the odds that their paths will part, leaving her without a hand to hold or the sanctum when he takes hold.
Eden levels his gaze. She cedes to dusky pools that proffer a refuge from the darkness that surrounds, then threatens to swallow her since the void is impossible to fill. Her face cracks as he muses, saying that it is better they’re no longer together with a hushed reverence for prospective — better — beloveds lest he hurt her.
Too late.
The inevitability of loss is universal.
Love is transient.
Her love.
He never loved her.
How can I say goodbye?
My flint heart quickly catches alight.
Your pyrex heart is fireproof.
I’m all lost, I don’t want to bring myself to say goodbye…
Eden is cold. She doesn’t feel strong. She feels empty, but brims with resignation. This is all her fault. There is something she lacks. John thinks she lacks something for him to stay, but swears she’s strong enough to withstand anything.
Even now, John remarks on her power as he traces her lips. Her body is a fortress. While the walls are secure, a shattered heart lay within, ravaged by the winds of change and rejection. These walls cannot protect her from the pain that consumes her. John thinks she can carry the world on her shoulders, but he can neither carry her nor create a world of their own.
This love.
Her love.
This world that she built.
At odds with the world she imagines but can never comprise.
Eden knows her own strength. She is condemned by it.
John kisses her forehead. His eyes are alight with a curious lustre. He climbs over her after she throws herself on the bed. He sweeps over her like a fever until her hair is wild.
Everything comes flooding back as Eden finds himself his arms, but fails to tide her over. Their hearts beat as one, she dreams. His thrusts proffer this illusion. For a second, the waves of heartache subside. It isn’t traditional love, but the prospect of safe harbour. Not unlike that of happy couples or polycules she seldom saw. They weren’t perfect, but they were present.
Content.
Loyal.
Always there.
Eden never wanted love. She just didn’t want to be alone. Her whole life was a sea that raged.
John had helped her anchor.
And never thought twice to cast her aside, adrift, and recede foreshore.
For himself.
For a siren.
Maybe one day, John would realize this was enough, even perfect; that her sense of novelty echoed a time when this love was new and the world was a brighter, happier place, and that it all meant something. That she was the one for him.
But by then, Eden would be long gone and John would be anchored to another, a more compatible conquest whom he resolved to oblige. He would yearn for love and settle on a smarter, prettier partner. Only to find this would fade in his heart of hearts.
He would see beyond the precarity that defines him now as a student, recluse, caregiver, and gentleman — always keen to satisfy so that he might earn his relief — that mangled whatever roots he dared lay.
John thinks that pain awaits anything that lasts.
Eden knows that at the end of the road is permanence. It wasn’t about pain or pleasure. It was about forever.
John has made peace with his travels, the transience of adulthood, as a nomad grateful for the slightest — whereas Eden enjoys assurance and a still.
Except the longer he goes, the likelier he is to conjure a delusion that will traverse even her own. How long would he brave the badlands before he sought refuge; before he gave in to a mirage, the lure of a lover whose charms would dissolve upon reflection? Where would he chase this apparition who proved untenable in the reality of life?
Where would this lead him?
Far from Eden.
He would build a home to fool himself, his heart, into believing that he had found what he sought, when in truth, it would be nothing but a shadow of his own making.
A matter of duty, convenience, and respectability would make him endure like those before him — even as he now cites the very same to sever ties that failed to bind.
John knows you can’t always leave; but he lacks stability and so has yet to learn this firsthand. There are some things you can’t walk away from.
A house.
A job.
A child.
A dying wish.
A wound fatalized by any prospect of his departure.
He would come by these things. If not all, then at least one.
And these things would incline him to reach back when they reached out.
He would send them infrequent albeit assured messages.
He would appear at will because the intimacy absolved the need for invitation.
He would care and they would know.
Even if he didn’t really care.
Maybe it would take less than two years.
Eden is as much a realist as a pessimist. She’s not vain enough to think that if he could leave her, he could walk away from anyone. Yet this likeness does not quell in the time that elapses.
John mentions that he sleeps off his problems to escape the pain of waking life. Only in sleep can he find peace, but Eden knows that solace is only temporary.
Everything is.
Like now.
For a moment, she feels complete, as if all the pieces of her shattered heart have come together. John restores the whole as she holds his hand. All the same, Eden is filled with a sense of longing and sadness, knowing this moment cannot last forever.
But in this moment, she is content to simply bask in the afterglow and cherish the memories of what once was.