I didn't manage without him.
Pretending only took me so far, and by the time I got home from work at the end of the day, I couldn't keep up a front anymore.
By early December, five weeks and four days (but who was counting) after Colin left, I'd still only managed to go to sleep in my bed four times, and each of those nights I ended up on the couch by the wee hours anyway.
I'd bought a new mattress and thrown the old one away.
The straps and cuffs went to the very back of my closet, hidden in an old suitcase, because I couldn't bear to throw those away—and you couldn't exactly return, donate, or sell used sex toys. That ranked right up there with video chatting in a movie theatre on the list of ways to go straight to hell.
And I'd even moved the bed to the other side of the room, spending part of an afternoon shoving all the furniture around and completely rearranging.
It didn't matter.
Nothing seemed to help.
