And if it means anything—I think she’s still in there.
Waiting.
Like mine is.
Like maybe they’re both just pacing in the same room, waiting for us to stop pretending long enough to open the fucking door.
ChapterTwenty-Five
Kit
May 3rd, 1997
Something changed.I can’t pinpoint the exact message where the tone shifted, when harmless lyric exchange between two usernames gave way to ...whatever it is that we’re sharing.
Thoughts, emotions ...moments we keep to ourselves—at least I do.It crept in slowly—like a song fading in from silence, barely audible at first, until it takes up the entire room and you’re suddenly surrounded by it, wrapped in a sound you didn’t know you needed.
I didn’t expect this.I didn’t prepare for him to start making me feel again—not just nostalgia or melancholy or ...something almost electric.
Now?
Now I can’t stop thinking about him.That alone is dangerous in ways I don’t want to admit.Not just because he’s a stranger online with a voice that cuts too close to something I still miss—but because he already had a soulmate.Not just someone he loved.
A fucking soulmate.
That’s sacred.She’s the person he poured his music into.The one who bled through his lyrics like she owned them.
Sure, they’re no longer together.But that kind of love—that kind of consuming, all-in, you-are-the-air-in-my-lungs love—it doesn’t just vanish.It lingers in your blood.It lives in your silence.It haunts every person who comes after.And you can’t be someone’s second love after that.
You can’t be the “new beginning” to a story that already had its ending written in fucking fire.That would be setting myself up for failure before I even said hello.
And I’ve already failed too many times to pretend I’m not afraid to try again.
But this man.This anonymous and maddeningly familiar person—sees right through me.He forces me to remember what it was like to be known.
Fully.
Deeply.
Unapologetically.
He makes me remember what it was like to be loved in a way that frightened me.And he reminds me of Roderick fucking Wilder.
God.Roderick.
The connection we had wasn’t ordinary.It wasn’t easy.It was intense—it was two storms colliding.We didn’t have conversations.We had symphonies.Arguments that sounded like overtures.Silences that screamed.Love that burned so hot it singed everything in its path.
His hands read me like sheet music he’d memorized since the beginning of time.He touched me like every inch of my skin was an instrument only he knew how to play—like he could coax sounds from me that I didn’t think I had.
He spoke softly when necessary—when the world around us got too loud—and when he did, it went straight through my chest.
We loved each other with a madness that sometimes scared me.I think it scared him too, but he was better at pretending it didn’t.And even through the fire, I loved him.I loved him beyond logic, beyond caution, beyond the version of myself I thought I needed to protect because I knew people left.I experienced it with my parents.Mom died, and my father never ...he wasn’t there for me.
Still, I believed in my Wild—until one day, I looked around and realized I already lost him.
That’s when everything cracked.That’s when I stopped trusting love.
I lost myself in lies and half-truths, and pretty little promises that were never going to be kept.I let men say the right words in the wrong tones.Let them touch me without feeling anything.Let them in just enough to believe I wasn’t alone, but not enough to be seen.I kept searching for pieces of what I’d had with Roderick in people who were never capable of caring enough for me.
