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The Man Who Forgot How to Love

Jaiden_1950
7
chs / week
The average realized release rate over the past 30 days is 7 chs / week.
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Synopsis
Ben had loved her his entire life. Laura, the girl who knew how to light up every room, who always got what she wanted, and who never once looked back to see him standing there. When he finally confessed his feelings, she shattered him with seven words: “To be with you would be out of pity.” That day, something inside him died. Years later, Ben is no longer the quiet boy from a small town. In the heart of Madrid’s corporate world, he has become everything she once said he was not: successful, confident, and untouchable. But the price of that transformation was steep. He built his empire on numbness. Love became a weakness, and women became distractions. Then fate calls him home. Joseph, his best friend, is getting married to Laura’s sister. And Laura? The life she once dreamed of has turned to dust. Her perfect marriage has crumbled, her pride is in pieces, and for the first time, she sees in Ben what she never saw before. But Ben is not alone anymore. In Madrid, he met Annalucia, a woman whose enchanting eyes and quiet strength began to reach the part of him that Laura destroyed. She loves him for who he is, flaws and all, but she may lose him to the woman who broke him. Now, caught between the ghost of his past and the promise of something real, Ben must decide if he will forgive or finally learn to love again.
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Chapter 1 - Chapter 1: The Girl on the Pedestal

Chapter 1: The Girl on the Pedestal

Ben had the kind of memory that collected small things and stitched them into meaning. A chipped blue mug on the windowsill of the classroom they had shared since primary school. The squeal of the old school bus brakes on rainy mornings. The way sunlight looked on Laura's hair when she leaned over a book and tucked a loose strand behind her ear without thinking.

Small town life made people easy to read. Everyone stuck to the same routes: home, school, the corner tienda, the river road. Faces repeated themselves like familiar songs. Laura's face, though, never felt ordinary to Ben. She moved through the world as if she were conducting it, tilting conversations where she wanted them to go, laughing at things most people did not find witty, making teachers change their minds and classmates bend to her logic without noticing they had been led. She was sharp and loud and beautiful in a way that felt deliberate, as if she had practiced charm and then abandoned the script because she liked the way being effortless confused people.

Ben put her on a pedestal because he had nowhere else to put the weight of his admiration. He had grown up next door to her, shared homework assignments, begrudging group project partners, the same wonky chemistry professor at university. They had the same friends, which made it worse. He watched her move through the same circles, saw the way other boys glanced at her and left. He imagined, ridiculous and stubborn, that maybe she would look at him the same way he looked at her.

Joseph was the kind of friend who narrated Ben's internal life like a sports commentator. He would hoot and poke and say things like, "You look at her like she's the last mango on the tree." When Ben said he loved her, Joseph pretended not to hear. When Ben kept bringing her up during workouts, over cheap beers, in the silence between classes, Joseph would clap him on the back and roll his eyes, the easy dismissal that came from affection.

"You and half the campus," Joseph had said once, while loading plates of toast into his mouth.

Ben had laughed with him. Inside, his laugh was brittle. He could have been another boy among many. Except he wasn't. He could list the ways Laura was different: how she read European history for fun, how she smelled faintly of citrus when she walked by, how she always knew the right answer in arguments and then wore that correctness like a victory perfume. He told himself it wasn't about possession. It was about recognition. To Ben, Laura was an answer to some vague question he hadn't known he had been asking.

The decision arrived like weather. Maybe it was the end of a semester, a nervousness tightening in his throat, or maybe it was just the small cruelty of youth that made him believe declarations could change someone's life. He bought a cheap flower from a woman on the street because it felt like a ceremonial gesture, less a bribe than a truth. The sticker on the florist's bag said "Spring Festival" in curling letters that had nothing to do with his trembling hands.

That night the sky opened up, and he watched the town dissolve into smudges through the bus window. Rain turned every neon sign into a halo. His palms were damp when he stepped off the bus and walked the last few blocks to Laura's house. The streetlights painted the wet pavement with gold.

His heart made a steady, traitorous drumbeat. He rehearsed lines in his head like a nervous actor. Don't stammer. Don't be a parody. Be honest. Be him. The thing about truth is that it expects a certain kind of courage; Ben had spent most of his life telling truths to himself, not to other people.

She opened when he knocked. For a moment, the sight of her standing there, hair damp from the rain, the collar of her sweater sopping, felt like the exact center of the universe. She asked his name like someone who had been expecting the wrong person. Her voice was the same voice he had catalogued for years, light and precise, a tone that could, unfairly, rank the day into before and after simply by entering it.

"Ben?" she said, puzzled and kind in a way that hurt. "What are you doing here?"

He handed her the flower as if it contained everything he could never otherwise say. "I need to tell you something," he said. He almost told her the flawed version, You'll be mine eventually, but he swallowed it down and found something better, rawer.

"I like you," he said. "No, Laura, I love you. I have for a long time."

The silence that followed had weight. She looked at him the way a scientist looks at an unexpected specimen, curiosity edged in protective distance. Then she laughed. The sound was small and quick, edged with the kind of disbelief that needed no malice to hurt. It attested to the fact that she had never once imagined the possibility he had hoped for.

"To be with you would be out of pity," she said, crisp as a breaking icicle. "I mean, look at you."

He didn't argue. He had no witty rebuttal. Her words performed a geometry he didn't know the shape of. He was minor, insignificant, a study in contrast to whatever idealized image she preferred. The flower felt suddenly absurd in his hand, a token he hadn't earned. He turned and walked away into the rain. He didn't cry, at least not then. The town swallowed him like water going down a drain. The streetlights blurred.

For weeks after, he did something small and stupid. He left flowers on her porch. No notes, no messages. Just flowers which he placed carefully on the step before he hid back into his own life. It was less a hope and more an insistence on memory. Each flower said: I was here. I still am. For people who watched, it would look romantic or pathetic, depending on their appetite for melodrama. Joseph called it "the last flowers" and nagged him to stop.

"You're making yourself ridiculous," Joseph said one morning when Ben slumped into the gym with towels thrown clumsily over his shoulders. The clank of metal and the smell of iron filled the room. Sweat and effort were a different kind of confession, no words, only distance.

"It's not about her deserving it," Ben said, voice low. He sank onto a bench and watched Joseph go through the motions of his routine with that distracted energy friends have when they mean to comfort but don't know how.

Then, a week later, in the open atrium of a mall, he saw her, smiling and laughing with a man whose suit cost more than Ben's monthly rent. The world condensed into the impossible clarity of that moment: polished shoes, designer jacket, the way her hand lay on the man's arm as if that touch owned her. Ben raised a hand and waved, an absurd, hopeful gesture meant to flatten years into a single, foolish greeting.

She turned, and the expression on her face was an ice-sculpted thing. There was no surprise, no softness. There was a look that had only ever once been directed at him before, disgust. She didn't wave back. She looked away as if he were an insect that had crawled into the periphery of her life and bothered her.

That night it rained again. Rain charted the borders of memory in his body, and the air smelled like iron and old streets. He went home and soaked through like a confession. Joseph met him on the stoop with shoulders that carried the worry of an older brother. There was a tenderness in Joseph that could always see what Ben refused to see in himself.

"You need to leave," Joseph said softly. "She doesn't want you."

It was not a betrayal; it was necessary truth. Ben thought about fighting it. He thought about proving her wrong. He thought also about the sting of her laughter and the thinness of his currency, hope. That night he packed. He took whatever job would have him. He took a ticket out of the town that had learned his pattern and decided, in the way small towns do, to keep returning that pattern to him.

He did not know then that leaving could become a shape of survival. He did not know that leaving could translate pain into motion, or that motion could be mistaken for growth. He only knew that the act of keeping himself near Laura, of leaving flowers, waiting at doorsteps, believing in the fragile possibility of pity turned into love, had become a kind of slow self-erasure. He would not let himself be erased any longer.

As the plane lifted off, Ben watched the coastal sprawl shrink into a mosaic of roofs and roads. Rainclouds drifted under the belly of the aircraft like memory islands. The pedestal he had built for Laura did not crumble neatly; it simply grew quiet, one small debt tucked away until a future could be built around its absence. He told himself, for the first time unarguably, that he would change. He would go somewhere they didn't know him. He would learn to be someone who wasn't defined by one girl's dismissal.

The city waiting on the other side of the ocean would not be gentle. It would be loud and efficient and blind to his old griefs. But there, Ben decided as the plane hummed on into the night, he would find a new kind of life. He would learn to put himself back together. He would learn to stop waiting on porches.

Still, as the lights of home receded into the dark, the memory of Laura's laugh sat like a stone in his stomach. It would not leave him. It would follow, a shadow with a face.