And even now after everything she was begging for a reaction. Some sign that she mattered.
She screamed again, her voice gone hoarse. “WHY? Why can’t you show me something, anything?!”
And I moved.
I didn’t think. I just wrapped my arms around her waist from behind, pulling her body back into mine. Her spine collided with my chest and her breath caught like I’d yanked her from the edge. Maybe I had.
“Peach,” I whispered, low and rough. Her name on my lips felt like a prayer and a warning. “Not here. Let’s take you home.”
Her body melted for a breath. Softened. But I felt it.... That resistance. It was there hot, strong. The fight she wasn’t ready to let go of. The hope she still carried for him, buried beneath every wound.
She still wanted to be chosen. Even after everything.
And fuck, that broke something in me.
Because I would’ve chosen her a hundred times over. But I wasn’t the ghost she couldn’t stop chasing.
I held her tighter anyway. Let her rage drain into me inch by inch. Let her cry without shame. Let her say the words she needed, even if they weren’t meant for me.
Because I loved her. And loving her meant holding her even when she wished I was someone else.
PENN
My phone pings as I sit alone on the deck of this broken home. Carrie left not long after we got back. Dane is gone too, his jacket still wrapped around my shaking body like a second skin. He said he had to go for work some sort of business. Mail business, apparently. I’m not sure what kind of urgent missions a mail guy takes on, but here we are.
The cherry-red cider I pulled from the fridge lingers on my lips, useless against the ache in my chest. I want it to numb me, to burn everything down inside until nothing hurts. Dane’s touch soothed the wounds, but Blake’s memory always comes back, carving me open again. So, I sit here alone, doing things I know are bad for me, offering my soul to the dark, hoping it’ll swallow me whole.
I pull Dane’s jacket tighter. His scent is thick in the lining, comforting me. It’s the only thing keeping me from dissolving. I close my eyes and picture his smile bright and warm, shining through the storm in my mind.
Then the gate creaks open on a gust of wind, and with it comes the man who haunts me the most. Blake. His bar has long since closed. The nightlife, the lust, the poor decisions, all folded into dirty sheets and forgotten sins. While he played pretend, I sat here, under fairy lights flickering through tree branches, lighting up the wreckage of me.
Another ping. My phone lights up. Blake’s face fills the screen.
He’s trying to summon Pandora from her cave to drag her out into his light, like she’s the cure for his rot. The irony? His wife is the one he cast aside.
Pretending to be two people is exhausting. Maybe I should just stop. Cancel the magazine piece Carrie arranged. Hide in these sheets that still smell like Dane, with Blake’s cologne ghosting the edges.
No one knows how badly I want to vanish. I opened Pandora’s box, and now I can’t find the lid.
He’s watching his phone, waiting for her reply. She hasn’t responded in hours. The thread above shows messages about a party his club is throwing, a masked night of madness, a game of hide and seek for lust-filled lovers.
Come,he wrote.I want to kiss your lips under the lights. Drink, dance, find you in the crowd. My Pandora, I think of you when I think of forever. You were chaos tonight, but inside that storm, you felt like home. Fall with me. Trust me. Let me catch you. I’m sitting in the garden that I along with my ex made for our daughter, and I could use a little of that trust fall from you tonight.
My eyes sting. He’s messaging another woman, begging for trust, while he kneels in the grass of a garden we planted together for the baby we lost. Bleeding to her a garden he made with his ex. That is all I am... The ex.... The mother of his dead daughter, because I couldn’t even do that right.
He doesn’t even realize she is me.
Should I feel bad for him? Maybe. But mostly, I feel tired. Tired of being split between the woman he threw away and the illusion he chases.
He used to be my perfect melody. Now he’s just a fading song of broken notes.
My phone buzzes again, a different tone. Dane.
I want to build you a castle from the rubble of that broken love, Penn. Just remember that.
He stole my heart, and I didn’t even notice. While I cried over Blake, Dane was quietly stitching me back together with every look, every soft touch, every sweet word he sent and whispered.
I type:If you’re going to lie, you should do it in bed.
