I mean it.

I would leave before the end of the night, leave you standing in the doorway, eyes searching the darkness for me. 
Later, I would take you upstairs to my room, but you would not feel welcome.  You would feel like an outsider, that there were somehow not enough chairs although there were enough.  You would comment that you thought the place was haunted; you would want to leave.  

I would frustrate you.  I would shake sometimes.  I would cry sometimes, and you would not know why.  I would suddenly stop smiling and stare off into the distance, and when you asked me what was wrong, I would shake my head. My lips would curve back into a smile, but it would be more of a smirk, really, like I had forgotten what joy was and was mocking it halfheartedly.  My eyes would not smile.

I would be afraid of you, always, and you would never know why.  I would recoil from your touch.  I would disappear for weeks at a time, I would become distant even after undisappearing.  Also before.

You would see me sometimes, laughing with others, and you would imagine me, like that, with some man’s hands finding their way under my clothes, confident and easy and uninhibited.  You would wonder why I was not that way with you.

You would put up with it, for a while.  You would cry to me, try to put your finger on what it was that you were feeling, seeing, and I would dismiss it.  I would accuse you of being threatened by my intelligence.  Of not loving me for all that I am.  I would tell you stories about a feral cat, tamed but untamed, of wolves running ahead of the wind, of past men who hurt me in unspecified ways, and the stories would not clarify at all, though I would talk down to you as though they should have.

Then I would make jokes, later, about squirrels.  I would talk about animals, and it would not clarify at all.  You would laugh with me.  I would speak like an infant, fixated, flirtatious, petty, and you would miss and long for the completeness that I had decided you did not love.  

Then, one day, I would leave.  I would not cry, despite the time we had spent.  You would beg me not to go -- for years, you would beg me not to have left.  It would be my turn to wonder why you would beg for that.  The color would return to my face.  I would not think of you.