Thinking about the way she looked at me the last time we crossed paths like she’d let me ruin her if I asked gently enough.
My phone lights up once more.You still there?Yeah, Peach. God, I’m here.
I type.Yeah. Still here. Get some sleep.
I almost added, "I’ll talk to you tomorrow." But that feels like a promise. And men like me shouldn’t make promises to women like her. Not until I clean up the pieces of the life she doesn’t know I’m holding.
I set the phone on my chest. Close my eyes. The city hums beneath me, alive and sleepless. I make a quiet decision, the kind that shifts the ground under your feet. When I get back… I’m not keeping my distance anymore. Let the world burn. Letthe paperwork wait. Let the consequences come. She’s worth the risk.
Sleep takes me slowly, gently, with her name still echoing in my chest like a prayer I’m not brave enough to speak aloud.
I watched our memories turn to ashes. You melted. I shattered. I was made of glass; you were made of plastic cheap, flexible, indestructible in all the wrong ways. And still I paid the full price for loving someone who never deserved the currency of my devotion. How did I end up here? How did loving you become an affliction I treat with poetry and self-abandon?
One message rolls through my mind, relentless as surf waves crashing, pulling the sand out from under me, only to bury me again with the next. He came in the night and tipped my world upside down. Since he left, I’ve been clutching memories like a starved girl hoarding crumbs, trying to remember what a meal felt like. I would have died for him. I almost did, thinking my absence might spare him the agony of losing his daughter. But sacrifice isn’t always enough. It rarely is.
I run my tongue over my lip as the beach outside shatters itself against the shore, each crash echoing in my mind. High up inmy office, I imagine stepping through the glass—clean, silent, a shedding of old skin. Not to die. Just to tear Blake’s taste from my soul and replace it with Dane, the only flavour that doesn’t poison me.
It’s been twenty-four hours without him, and my body feels… wrong. Misaligned. Like someone redrew my map but left out half the landmarks. But my nights? They’re still full of him his breath against my neck, the way he glares at coffee like it personally betrayed him, that crooked half-smile that ignites my veins and makes daylight feel unnecessary.
My heart is split in two. One half wants Dane wants to fall into him, into the abyss that smells like him, that looks at me like I’m not a disaster he inherited but a storm he chooses. The other half is stuck with Blake, tangled in what-ifs and maybes, blaming myself for every bruise, every disappointment, every piece of pain he hands me as if it’s my fault for not breaking the right way. He hurt me. He broke me. But I’m not sure I want to break him back.
Chaos and wreckage. They’re fluent languages to me. Maybe they’re the only ones I speak with any honesty. The toxic aftertaste of a now-ex sits on the edge of my tongue and I still God help me beg him in the quiet of my bones to come closer, to hurt me enough that I feel familiar again. Something must be broken in me. Something sharp and unfixable.
I twist back to my computer, to the magazine piece awaiting its own brand of bloodletting.
I start typing:
How did I fuck it all up in one night? Well, let me tell you. Love isn’t what it always seems. This is how Love Me With Lies began, and this is how I find myself writing its ending. Alone at midnight, I may kiss you goodnight or I may send you straightto hell, but darling don’t throw stones if you live in a glass house. Not everything is as it seems.
Notifications from the dating app flash Blake. Pictures of him living a life I’m no longer part of, but fate, cruel and amused, loops us together anyway. He tossed me aside, yet here he is begging a woman he thinks is a stranger to come kiss him better. Sunlight spills through the glass, warming my skin while something cold inside me cracks.
My thoughts drift to Dane. He met me knee-deep in a love story that was killing me slowly. He watched me beg, cry, plead for scraps while he stood there steady, stubborn fighting for a love he believes he deserves, and insists I do too. But do I?
I’m halfway over Blake. Maybe more. Because every time Dane looks at me, every time his fingers graze my skin, the ghost of Blake loses another piece of territory inside me.
My fingers hover above my phone. My mind wants answers. My heart isn’t sure it can take any more ache. But I breathe, let go, and let the words spill without permission:
How long have you watched me?
I close my eyes. Fall inward. Wait.
Seconds bleed into minutes. Minutes into something slower, something thick. Blake keeps blowing up my phone. Once, that would’ve set my heart on fire like a junkie shaking for one more hit. But now?
I look at the ninth message before opening it. He’s desperate for attention, for validation, for the comfort of a woman he’s never met. He wants Pandora to want him the way I wanted him to want me. Once. Not anymore.
There’s only so much begging, crying, pleading the soul can do before it calcifies. Before it moves on to survive.
Now he sits where I sat weeks ago pathetic, hopeful, hollow. Does his heart know it’s me? Would he recognise my voice if he were listening with anything other than need? How do you mistake the woman you married?
How do you not know the breath and rhythm of someone you once vowed to love?
Opening his message, I read the last and not worry about the eighteen before this one because this one takes my breath away and not in a good way. It slaps me in the face as disgust washes over my body. My cheeks flamed red with anger.
I want to fuck you stupid and watch you come undone at my hands and then I will fuck you back together again and you will know that each time you get that burning between your thighs it was my cock that did that.
If you find that romantic, you’re sick in the head. And you know what Blake, there is the reason right there as to why I’d never be with someone like you.
Blake replies so fast I feel a pang of whiplash.
