No Competition

This is what you get when you put all your eggs in one basket:
he's fucking your best friend while you're crying yourself to sleep.
You can only imagine their twined fingers as they rise and fall
and you are trying not to wake up your roommates with the sound
of remembering. And now you know for certain that what you had
with him was only ever sex, and it was barely even that to begin with,
and you wanted to slow yourself down enough to stop seeing
rose-colored circles in his eyes and to stop making him
into something he wasn't, but you tend to pick up a crush
and run with it. I mean sprint.

It all comes into focus now.
He only chose you when she wasn't around.

And your throat is itching to scream that you are not interchangeable
with her. The two of you may share a first name
but you are not a fucking package deal.
Nobody gets a medal for sleeping with both of you,
although he certainly went for the gold if there was one.
And it stings now to remember when you were alone with him, and
he tried to make you feel special by calling you by your last name instead,
only he slipped up and used hers instead of yours.
You wanted to believe it was an innocent mistake at the time,
but looking back it's pretty damn plain
that when he put his hands through your dark hair,
he was wishing it was blonde like hers.

And you feel little now, like
a kid on a playground writing love notes in the sandbox to the boy
who's across the swing set pulling someone else's pigtails.
You should have seen it coming. There were too many bad omens,
but you had too many eggs and not enough baskets and you figured
it might just work out this time. What you didn't plan for
was the blue of her eyes shining just a bit more brightly than yours,
and the way her laugh tingles the spine while yours just sounds
like a punch in the gut. You are shirtless, writing poems alone
in your room again while she is texting you
to ask for his number.
And the grime of last night is still on your skin
and all you want to do is shower, but you know the water won't wash
away all the things you wanted from him, the things he never
intended to give you, and you don't want to look
in a bathroom mirror right now anyway.

It all comes down to this: you have always hated competing with her.
Mostly because you know at the end of the day
all she has to do is smile, and then
there is no competition.
You can't blame him
for figuring it out.