She looked at me like I could be that.
And now she’s slipping through my fingers like everything else I never deserved.
I squeeze my eyes shut, knuckles white around the balcony railing.
She’s not mine.
She can’t be.
Because if I let her in… she won’t come out whole.
And if she follows me into the dark… she might not come back at all.
But I still see her in every flash of light.
I still smell her perfume on my sheets — even when someone else is tangled in them.
And that?
That scares me more than any bullet ever did.
Because I think the war broke me.
But she… she’s the one I might not survive.
I can’t get her out of my fucking head.
I’ve tried.
I tried with whiskey burning down my throat like penance.
I tried with sleep — or the attempt at it.
I even tried with the blonde girl who crawled into my lap like she thought she could distract me, like she thought she could become her.
But she wasn’t.
I don’t even remember her name.
I just remember her.
Cassandra.
Standing there in those ridiculous bunny ears, tray balanced on her palm like she wasn’t holding the whole damn world together while she served drinks to men who didn’t see her as anything but something to take home. Her red lipstick — not just red, but dangerous, ruin-a-man red — burned itself into the back of my eyes.
I saw her the second she walked out.
It hit like a punch I didn’t see coming.
All that confidence she wore like armour was fractured.
And her eyes?—
Christ.
Her eyes looked at me like I’d stabbed her.
And maybe I had.
