The Sentinels come on, make it easy, say i never mattered.

Well, it wasn't the reaction she expected. At first she bristled at his tone, automatically indignant that he'd have the nerve to get mad at her when she hadn't even fucking done anything. She calmed down when she realized he was essentially yelling about what a badass she was, but not entirely. He didn't get it, but she waited for him to finish, expression a terse neutral.

You realize that was the setup for a killer blind joke, right? And you just missed it. She snorted, but wasn't done there. As tempting as it was to sidestep his whole tirade entirely, he'd thrown a good number of compliments in there. Those didn't come cheap from Penn.

I wish I was better than that. Fuck, do you know how many times I've told myself that? Fuck him. Fuck what he thinks, fuck what he does, fuck what he does and doesn't care about. But still, all I can think about is how hard I tried and how I still wasn't good enough. I know that's fucking stupid. I know that I'm amazing and worth way more than that bullshit. But it hurts, Penn.

At least she didn't feel like crying. In fact, she felt better than she had in a while, saying it out loud. It didn't make any sense. She should be better than this, and the fact that she wasn't was just another thing in the list of things that were wrong. If she could do anything to stop feeling this way, she would, in an instant.

So maybe I want to be a whiny bitch for a while. She'd earned the right, damn it. Eventually she'd get over it and used to the idea that nothing she'd hoped for was going to happen, but until then, she had to live with every damn thing reminding her of that fact. You don't have to listen.