The Leech's Perspective

Alex read the email a third time.

He sat at the kitchen table with his phone held up in both hands, the screen bright with Megan's careful, patient words. He'd read it fast the first time with his defences up. The second time slowly, going through each paragraph looking for the overstatement, the place where she'd misremembered or reached further than the evidence supported.

He hadn't found it. So he read it again.

She had opened with: "I've thought about this for a long time, and I need to be honest with you because I think you deserve that more than a quiet exit."

She wasn't angry. She was just clear — the particular clarity that comes from someone who has been patient for a long time and has finally decided that patience has run its course. Her words were considered and fair and each one landed exactly where she meant it to.

She named things. The times she'd called during something difficult and he'd listened for a few minutes before steering the conversation back to himself — not unkindly, not deliberately, just naturally, the way water finds the lowest point. The professional advice she'd asked for, genuinely in his area and easy for him to give, that he'd always been too busy to provide, despite never being too busy to ask for hers. The small limits she'd tried to set, and how he'd responded with a hurt that felt to her less like genuine pain and more like pressure — held steady until she gave way.

He went through each example looking for the one she had wrong.

He couldn't find it.

Not one.

He put the phone down on the table. He looked at the ceiling for a long moment — the kind where you are not actually looking at anything, you are just somewhere else. He thought about his sister, who had become gradually less available over the past year and given vague reasons when he'd asked. Three other friendships that had started warm and then quietly faded in ways he'd always put down to time and distance. He had never looked at all of these things at the same time before. He was looking at them now.

He didn't write back to Megan.

He wanted to. The impulse was immediate and strong — to explain himself, to offer context, to give her the version of events that showed his intentions more clearly. He recognised this impulse now, sitting with it, for what it actually was. Not accountability. A way of converting her clear observation into a conversation about his feelings — which was, he could see with a cold precision, exactly what she had described.

He typed the beginning of a reply. Read it back. It was, word for word, exactly what she would have expected him to send.

He deleted it.

He stayed with the discomfort instead. Let it be specific. Let it point at things without immediately defending himself from what it was pointing at.

He had not deliberately taken from people. He was completely certain of that. He was also beginning to understand that certainty about intention doesn't change anything about effect. You can extract from someone through habits so embedded they've become invisible — through a self-focus so constant it simply registers as personality, as just the way things are. The water finding the lowest point, over and over, without deciding to.

The extraction had been real regardless of what he'd meant by it.

He didn't write back to Megan. He respected her enough not to make her read another message about himself.

He picked up the phone and called his sister.

She answered after two rings, slightly surprised.

"Hey," he said. "How are you doing? Actually — how are you?"

She paused just a moment. Then she started talking. He stopped preparing what to say next. He just listened — actually listened, tracked what she was saying, stayed with it rather than waiting for a gap to move through.

It was the most present he'd been in a conversation in longer than he could remember. He had spent years talking to people without ever really being there. He was only now starting to understand the difference.