Edwina Carter.
Even the thought of her felt like a sin I was already too far gone to confess.
And I had wanted to touch her in every fucking way a man shouldn’t have wanted to touch his student. I had wanted to hear her beg and bite back tears, to feel the tension break under my hands until she couldn’t keep pretending that distance could save her. I had wanted to destroy every inch of space she used as armor and make her admit that the control she worshipped was only another form of fear.
Yet another part of me—the colder, quieter part—had wanted her nowhere near me. That part remembered what it had meant to lose, to fail, to stand in the ruin of a choice that couldn’t be undone and watch someone you loved die because you were too slow to make the right one. It remembered the blood, the rain, the silence that followed. It remembered the sound of my own breathing when hers had stopped.
I should have left Edwina alone. I should have ignored the sharpness in her tone and the gleam of defiance that lived beneath her polished words. I should have walked away the first time she looked at me with those hauting eyes that didn’t waver. But I hadn’t. I had pulled her closer instead, knowing full well what I was doing. She had unsettled me in ways that had nothing to do with sound or movement. Her presence changed the air itself, turned it heavy and charged until the silence between us felt alive, until every thought became an echo of her. She had been a question I never wanted to answer, a risk I swore I would never take again, and still, I took it. I had dragged her into my orbit, and once she was there, I couldn’t stop circling her, even when I told myself I should. I didn’t want to stop. Not really. I wanted her close enough to scorch me, and if I was honest, I wanted to see if I could burn her too.
The room had long since gone still, the faint hum of the radiator the only sound breaking the quiet, her name repeatingthrough my mind until it blurred into something wordless. I hadn’t turned on the lights. I never did when the thoughts grew too sharp. The dark had a way of shaping things, of making the edges softer, the guilt more bearable, the ghosts easier to tolerate.
The phone had buzzed then, and I had let it ring before answering, not out of reluctance, but out of habit.
“Still up?” came the voice, low and familiar.
Elias. The last living connection to a life I should have buried years ago. We had studied together once, lived under the same suffocating expectations, sat through the same dinners where silence was a performance and ambition the only acceptable emotion. He had stayed in that world and let it consume him. I had left it behind, though not cleanly.
“I figured you’d be grading,” he had said. “Or brooding. Though, in your case, they’re probably the same thing.”
I hadn’t answered. Elias never needed my permission to keep talking.
“Your father’s been asking,” he continued. “He wants to know how long you plan to hide in that ‘dead-end job.’ His words, not mine.”
Of course they were.
I had leaned back against the desk, the wood biting into my palm as I gripped the edge harder than I needed to. The room was still dark except for the narrow slats of city light spilling through the blinds, cold and gray against the wall.
“He says you’ve made your point,” Elias went on. “Whatever that point was. He wants you to come home, take your place, stop pretending you’re someone else.”
The words sank into me the way his always did, carrying the weight of something long overused, too familiar to hurt cleanly, reopening a wound that had forgotten how to bleed.
“I’m not coming back,” I had said, my voice low, even, stripped of anything that might sound like hesitation.
Elias hadn’t spoken for a moment. When he did, there was no surprise in his tone, only resignation. “You know, I still don’t understand it. You were the one they trusted, the one they built everything around. So what the hell are you doing teaching disinterested undergrads in a city that forgets your name before the ink on the roster dries?”
“I liked the forgetting,” I had murmured, rolling the whiskey glass between my fingers until the cold sweat from the glass soaked into my skin.
He sighed softly. “Hayden, how long are you going to keep punishing yourself?”
The question had hung in the room, suspended in the dark, cutting in a way that wasn’t cruel but was still too close to the bone.
I hadn’t answered because there had been nothing left to say. Elias couldn’t understand. He hadn’t watched a life end in his hands. He hadn’t stood on that rain-slick road with the weight of a dying heartbeat fading against his palm. He hadn’t learned what it meant to make the wrong decision and live every goddamn day in its aftermath. He hadn’t carried the ghost of the girl he saved into a classroom years later and watched her stare through him without recognition.
He hadn’t known what it meant for guilt to breathe. To speak.
We ended the call without warmth, our voices thinning into static until there was nothing left but silence pretending to be closure. I set the phone down as if it had seared through my palm, the ghost of Elias’s voice still circling somewhere behind my ribs. I stood in the dark for a long time, letting the stillness crawl through me. The shadows in this city didn’t cling the way they used to, they gave you room to breathe without reminding you of everything you’d buried. That was why I had come here.That was why I stayed. It wasn’t because I gave a damn about teaching, or because I still believed in knowledge or redemption or any of that academic bullshit. I stayed because here, no one knew what I had failed to save. No one asked why I chose the wrong car that night, why I could remember the sound of Edwina’s voice but not my hers.
And yet, even after I’d rebuilt my life from the wreckage and buried every trace of that road beneath years of silence, fate still dragged her back to me. Edwina Carter—alive, unknowing, standing in front of me again. And now she was mine to destroy in the only fucking way I knew how. Slowly, beautifully, completely.
After the call ended, sleep didn’t come. The quiet thickened, stretching long and thin, pressing against my ribs until I could feel my pulse pushing back. I didn’t bother turning on the lights. I knew every inch of that apartment by muscle memory, the creak in the floorboards just outside the kitchen, the uneven breath of air that slipped under the door of the room I never let anyone enter. The studio.
If it could even be called that. A hidden room at the far edge of the apartment, windowless and cold, always smelling faintly of oil and solvent and decay. The walls were covered in unfinished canvases, some half-done, others torn apart mid-stroke, as though completion itself was too dangerous a thing to allow. That room had become the only place where I could bleed without anyone seeing the mess.
I stretched a blank canvas onto the easel and opened a tube of black. The paint bled across the brush, heavy and wet. I dragged a line down the center, then another beside it, and another after that. The repetition was grounding at first. Controlled. But then my hand shifted, unbidden, the strokes softening into shape, the curve of a mouth, the faint downward pull at the corner, thetension she held there when she thought no one was watching. Her mouth. The silent defiance that lived inside her stillness.
I froze.
Fuck.
