It Was The Demons, Not Me

It Was The Demons, Not Me Chapter Two

I would sit there silently.

Waiting.

Watching.

Wondering.

Then he'd walk outside.

At first, I told myself I was imagining things.

Maybe the calls were innocent.

Maybe I was becoming insecure.

Maybe love had made me possessive.

I didn't want to be the jealous girlfriend.

I wanted to trust him.

So I tried.

But suspicion is stubborn.

It doesn't always shout.

Sometimes it whispers.

And the more I tried to silence that whisper, the louder it became.

He started taking calls outside.

Then he began leaving me alone during events.

His attention seemed to move from one person to another.

And slowly, the beautiful picture I had created in my mind began developing cracks.

I just wasn't ready to look through them.

Not yet.

Because I was still in love.

And sometimes the hardest truth to accept is not that someone changed.

It's that perhaps you never knew them as well as you thought you did.

I would soon discover exactly how much I didn't know.

And when I did, my heart would never look at love the same way again.

SWIMMING IN LOVE

The week after I met him felt like a dream I didn't want to wake from.

Every morning, I checked my phone before I even got out of bed.

There was always something from him.

A greeting.

A question.

A joke.

Sometimes nothing more than a simple, "How did you sleep?"

But somehow, those few words could change the entire direction of my day.

I had never understood how quickly a person could become part of your routine.

He was becoming mine.

When I went to class, I wondered whether I would see him.

When I walked back to my room, I wondered whether he would call.

When I attended church, I looked around for him before I even found a seat.

I had begun arranging my days around someone who had only recently entered my life.

And I didn't see anything wrong with it.

I was happy.

Really happy.

Then I discovered that he attended the same college.

I remember the moment I saw him through the window.

There he was.

Among students.

Walking as though he had no idea that my entire world had just stopped for a second.

I smiled to myself.

"God really sent him," I thought.

It seemed too perfect to be coincidence.

The church.

The college.

The conversations.

The attraction.

Everything seemed to fit.

I began imagining what our future could look like.

We were both young and studying. We could finish school together. We could find jobs. We could build a home.

I imagined him as my husband.

I imagined him as the father of my children.

I imagined him becoming a provider.

The strange thing was that I hadn't known him long enough to know whether he could actually become any of those things.

But love didn't ask me for evidence.

Love asked me to believe.

And I did.

I didn't care that he was a year younger than me.

One year meant nothing when my heart had already decided that he was the one.

I started imagining little things.

The meals we would cook.

The arguments we would have and laugh about afterward.

The way he might hold my hand when we walked.

The day we would tell our families about us.

The home we might someday share.

I was building an entire future with a man I was still getting to know.

I didn't realize that I was falling in love with a picture of him.

And pictures don't always show what is happening outside the frame.

The Door We Opened

As our relationship grew closer, there came a time when our affection became physical.

I knew what I was doing.

I wasn't forced.

I wasn't confused about what was happening.

I wanted him.

And he knew exactly how to make me feel wanted.

The intimacy made me feel even more connected to him.

I thought it meant we were becoming one.

I thought it meant our relationship was becoming serious.

I thought perhaps this was another step toward the future I had already imagined.

But afterward, something felt different.

Not immediately.

At first, everything seemed normal.

But when I looked back, I realized that this was around the time the atmosphere between us began changing.

There was something I couldn't explain.

He still laughed with me.

He still called me.

He still made me feel special.

But there were moments when his attention seemed to drift away.

His phone became more important.

His conversations became longer.

And some conversations suddenly needed privacy.

I noticed it one evening when his phone rang.

He looked at the screen.

Then at me.

Then he stood up.

"I'm going outside."

I watched him walk away.

I told myself not to think about it.

But my mind had already started asking questions.

Who was calling?

Why couldn't he answer in front of me?

Why did he need to leave the room?

I tried to push the questions away.

I wanted to trust him.

After all, what kind of relationship could survive if every phone call became a reason for suspicion?

So I stayed quiet.

But silence doesn't always mean peace.

Sometimes silence is simply where suspicion grows.

The Girls at Church

I noticed him approaching new people at church.

At first, I admired that quality.

He was friendly.

Confident.

Welcoming.

He seemed like the kind of person who could make strangers feel at home.

Then I noticed something that made me uncomfortable.

He was approaching girls.

Not just one.

Different girls.

And there was something familiar about the way he did it.

It was almost exactly how he had approached me.

The same smile.

The same confidence.

The same effortless conversation.

I tried to laugh it off.

Maybe I was being jealous.

Maybe this was simply who he was.

Maybe I was allowing my feelings to make innocent behavior look suspicious.

Then he started talking to girls who spoke his language.

That was when the distance between us became even more obvious.

They could speak to him in words I couldn't understand.

I would sit beside him while a conversation unfolded right in front of me, completely shut out from it.

Sometimes he would smile while talking.

Sometimes he would laugh.

Sometimes the conversation would continue for a very long time.

And then the phone calls started.

Long calls.

Calls that seemed to have no ending.

Calls that made him walk outside.

I began noticing how quickly he would move away whenever certain people called.

I hated the feeling inside me.

It wasn't just jealousy.

It was fear.

Fear that the future I had imagined was built on something that wasn't real.

One evening, I finally asked him.

"Who were you talking to?"

He looked at me calmly.

"Nobody."

Nobody.

That word stayed with me.

Nobody had a name.

Nobody had a voice.

Nobody had been calling him for long periods.

But I wanted to believe him.

So I nodded.

"Okay."

That was my answer.

But inside, another voice had started speaking.

Something is wrong.

I didn't know how right that voice would become.

The Pattern

Suspicion changes the way you see everything.

A message that once looked ordinary suddenly looks suspicious.

A smile becomes a question.

A phone call becomes evidence.

A late arrival becomes a story you desperately want to believe.

I didn't want to become that woman.

I didn't want to search his phone.

I didn't want to accuse him without proof.

But something inside me refused to settle.

The more I observed, the more I noticed.

He wasn't simply friendly with women.

There seemed to be a pattern.

New girls would arrive.

He would approach them.

Numbers would be exchanged.

Conversations would follow.

Then there would be calls I wasn't included in.

I began wondering whether what I had thought was special between us was actually something he did with everyone.

That thought hurt.

I wanted to be different.

I wanted to be the woman he had chosen.

I wanted to believe that when he looked at me, he saw his future.

But doubt had entered the relationship.

And once doubt enters, it becomes difficult to make it leave.

One day, I couldn't take it anymore.

His phone was nearby.

I stared at it.

My heart began beating faster.

I knew what I was thinking.

I also knew I might regret it.

But I wanted the truth.

Not another explanation.

Not another "you're imagining things."

The truth.

I remembered the pattern used to unlock his phone.

I watched him before.

I had noticed the movement of his finger.

I had noticed the way the screen responded.

I had noticed the marks left behind.

I tried it.

The phone unlocked.

For a moment, I simply stared at the screen.

My heart was beating so loudly that I could almost hear it.

I told myself I would look only once.

Just enough to prove that I was wrong.

Then I opened the messages.

The first thing I saw made my stomach turn.

There were girls.

More than one.

Then I saw the conversations.

They weren't innocent.

They weren't friendly.

They weren't what I had imagined.

There were intimate photographs.

Dirty conversations.

Words that no woman wants to read from the man she believes loves her.

And then I kept scrolling.

Another girl.

Another conversation.

Another photograph.

Another secret.

My hands began shaking.

I couldn't breathe normally.

The room suddenly felt smaller.

The man I had imagined as my husband was talking to other women in ways I could never have imagined.

And the worst part wasn't that there was one woman.

It was that there were many.

At the same time.

I sat there staring at the phone, feeling as though someone had reached inside my chest and torn something apart.

I had been swimming in love.

Now I felt as though I was drowning in betrayal.

I wanted to cry.

I wanted to scream.

I wanted to wake up and discover that everything was a nightmare.

But the messages were still there.

The photographs were still there.

The evidence was sitting in my hands.

And for the first time, I understood that the future I had been dreaming about might never have existed.

Then I heard footsteps.

He was coming back.

I quickly put the phone down.

My heart was racing.

He walked into the room.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

And suddenly, I was no longer looking at the man I thought I knew.

I was looking at a stranger wearing the face of someone I loved.

That was the moment everything changed.

But I still didn't know that the most unbelievable sentence of our relationship was waiting for me.

A sentence he would repeat whenever I discovered another betrayal.

A sentence that would become the title of my story.

"It's demons, not me."

And somehow, I would believe him.

For a while.

The Confrontation

I didn't sleep that night.

How could I?

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the photographs.

Every time I tried to calm myself, I remembered the conversations.

And every time I looked at him, I wondered how someone could hold me, kiss me, tell me he loved me, and then turn around and give another woman the same attention.

By morning, I had made a decision.

I was going to confront him.

I waited until we were alone.

He noticed immediately that something was different.

"What's wrong?"

I looked at him.

For a few seconds, I couldn't speak.

Then I asked the question that had been burning inside me.

"Who are those girls?"

His expression changed.

"What girls?"

I told him what I had seen.

The names.

The messages.

The photographs.

Everything.