He looked like a man stepping out of a different story.
Carrie’s hand landed on my shoulder. “Penn...he’s here. Blake isn’t.” Her voice held weight. “And he’s wearing some fucking nice shoes, I might add.”
I stifled a small laugh. But the ghost of the lips I once called home still haunted me.
Carrie helped me to my feet. My hands trembled as Dane started reading the pages he’d caught. I froze.
Carrie’s arm slipped around my waist, her head resting on my shoulder, her hair brushing my cheek. The wind circled us, like it was trying to hold us all together. To feel the brutal ache stitched inside the scarlet-red ink of a story that once was fiction—until it wasn’t.
My eyes drifted slowly up Dane’s body, to his lips.
The way they moved around my words sparked something deep inside me.
He read with reverence, like the pages had been meant for him.
Then he got to a piece I hadn’t meant for anyone. Not yet. It was pulled from the journal of my current heartbreak. Raw. Undressed.
I feel like he didn’t just carve out my heart…but a piece of my soul as well. I feel empty. So, empty without those pieces. I’m walking around with vital parts of myself missing.
Tears fell from my eyes.
His voice velvety, melancholic breathed something into those words I didn’t know they could hold. Carrie choked on her own tears. Grief wrapped around the three of us like a storm surge.
I had to escape it.
I didn’t want to pull them into this vortex with me.
“Penn... there’s so much heartache in those words. You’re going to have readers bleeding for you.”
I glance sideways at Carrie. Her eyes are glassy, shimmering with unshed tears, her cheeks pink from the Wellington wind and whatever emotion she’s too proud to name. A cracked smile ghosts across my lips, the kind that doesn’t reach the eyes. I nod. There’s nothing left to say.
“If I knew the pain to come, Penn, I would’ve ripped that story from your hands and burned every page.”
“If I knew what love would cost, Carrie, I never would’ve touched him.”
I rip the pages from Dane’s hands, sling my bag over my shoulder, and wipe the tears tracing down my cheeks. Then I walk through the wet grass, through the city, through the mess I made.
My smartwatch vibrates.
“I could be the something inside your new someone…if you let me shoulder the hurt, Penn.” A message from Dane.
Why is he always like this, gentle, soft in a world that shredded me? Why can’t Blake be this man?
I fish my phone from my coat pocket, fingers trembling. I type a Blake on the dating app.
“Have you ever been a lighthouse for a lost lover?”
The reply is instant.
Do you need a lighthouse, baby?”
Baby.
He still calls me that, like time hasn’t cut us into strangers.
We used to make gods of each other. Now I’m just a ghost talking to a man who doesn’t know I’m haunting him.
I reply, “For years, I loved someone I thought I knew…until he turned my world to ash.”
