Shit, I don’t even know what I thought anymore. I thought maybe — just maybe — he’d accept me. That for one impossible heartbeat, I meant something to him. That I wasn’t just another ghost drifting through the wreckage of his life, haunting his bed, swaying like smoke around the edges of his nightmares.
But the second reality hit him, he turned back into the same man who’d already torn my soul open with nothing more than a look and a single, cruel truth. The same man who left me bruised and breathless at the bar while some blonde with legs for days rode his thigh like I hadn’t even happened. Like I’d never been in his hands. Like I’d never been pressed against that mirror with his mouth at my throat and his heart pounding as if I was something worth breaking for.
“I shouldn’t have fucking touched you.”
His words won’t stop circling my head — a loop, a noose, a mantra I never asked for.
But you did.
You did.
And I melted into every second of it like it was salvation, like it was the only oxygen my lungs had left. I let you put your mouth on me like I belonged there. I let you whisper butterfly like the word was sacred. I let you worship me in a way no one ever has — like you were going to keep me, like you wanted to.
And then?
You remembered who you were.
And I remembered who I wasn’t.
I’m not the girl who gets chosen.
I’m not the girl who makes the demons go quiet.
I’m not the girl a man like Dax fucking Kingston loses his mind over.
I’m just a pretty little distraction with a bad job, a soft heart, and a talent for falling in love with disasters wearing human skin.
The silence in Lola’s apartment stretches tight around me, thin as wire and just as dangerous. She hasn’t come out of her room. Not since last night. Not since I came home with smeared lipstick, swollen lips, glassy eyes, and the kind of silence that explains everything without a single word.
She knows.
She always knows.
And I can’t even cry.
I’ve used up every tear I had left on that man already — every drop wrung out of me like he was squeezing the last softness from my bones.
So I stand under the shower until the water turns cold enough to sting. I scrub my skin until it’s pink and raw, as if I canwash away the memory of his mouth, his hands, his breath hot against my throat.
But it doesn’t work.
Because he touched me like he was drowning.
And I let him.
I let him take one last breath before he disappeared all over again, like he always does, like he always will.
I dress slowly, each movement heavy, deliberate. Black jeans. Black tank. My hair still damp from the shower. No makeup. No perfume. No armour.
Just me.
Raw.
Stripped.
Empty.
I write a note for Lola and leave it on the counter. I don’t say much.
