Their relationship ended after just over four weeks. He took her aside one night at work to tell her that he couldn't carry on with it. He'd enjoyed the time they'd spent together but his rational mind had taken control of things for him.
"It doesn't feel right for me." He looked her straight in her eyes. "I don't want to get in too deep. I'm leaving in a couple of months and I don't want to go with a feeling I'm leaving someone behind. I don't want this to sound bad but I'm trying to stop myself loving you, I don't want to fall in love with you. It's a kind of protection for me. I don't want to feel real pain again. Pain in the heart. I hope you understand, and before you ask, it's not because I still love her. I try not to think of her. When she's in the room I treat her as a friend."
He'd tried to let her down gently, not wanting to hurt her feelings, and he felt better to have got things off his chest. He didn't want to mess her around. She didn't talk to him for the rest of the night. He understood.
About a month later she left the bakery to work elsewhere. She'd told him she planned to leave so he felt no guilt. Anyway, he wasn't the big-headed, self-centred type of guy to think someone would leave because of him.

In an odd way he felt better now that he'd ended the relationship. He'd not known her that long but in some ways felt tied to her in that period. She'd not pressured him at all, though sometimes he got the impression she expected things of him. He just wasn't used to it - the closeness. He figured that maybe he was a better person when he was on his own. He was so used to doing things by himself that when faced with another player in the game he'd reacted.

His ex-girlfriend heard the news not long after and asked about her.
"What happened? Why did you finish it? Are you sad?"
"To tell you the truth... no. It might sound shitty of me to say that. I really didn't feel anything for her, that's why I did what I did. Not only would I have been messing her around but myself also."
He sometimes thought of himself as a stone-cold son of a bitch.