I press the heel of my hand to my chest like I can hold myself together, but one tear slips anyway, hot and unwanted.
He didn’t just want me.
He tried to take care of me.
And I have no idea what to do with that.
Chapter 35
Five days.
Five days since she walked out of my flat wearing my shirt and breaking my heart with every quiet step toward the elevator. Five days since her scent clung to my pillows. Five days since her laugh curled around my ribs and made a home there.
Five fucking days since I touched her, since she looked at me like I was worth believing in, worth loving.
Now I’m pacing sidewalks like a feral thing, haunted by memories instead of hunger. There’s a clock inside my chest stuck on the moment she slipped away.
I haven’t slept, not really. I close my eyes and she’s there—blonde hair across my pillow like sunlight I don’t deserve, her leg hooked over mine, her breaths warming my throat—like I was home and safety, not the storm that tore everything apart.
Then I wake up, and she’s gone again.
Every morning this week, I’ve stood outside her office door long before dawn, hood up, head down, pretending I’m not waiting for her like a lovesick fool.
Every morning, I hope and every morning, she doesn’t come.
I walk the boardwalk she loves, where the air smells of salt and mornings and hope. I pass the little coffee shop she goes to every morning, the one she brought me to, back when days felt easy and the world made sense. I haunt the places she loves, like some fool praying the universe will put her in my path again. I am a grown man, a professional athlete, a man who’s stood under floodlights with thousands of eyes on him and never flinched, yet the only thing that terrifies me in this world is losing her. Truly losing her.
Cormac called last night, and the night before, and the one before that.
Give her time, lad.
Women don’t heal on a clock.
Patience isn’t weakness. It’s love.
I heard him. I respect him. I don’t have it in me.
Not now. Not after finding her. Whatever I was before her? That man is a stranger. A life that doesn’t fit anymore. I used to know how to exist alone—clean, neat, controlled. That’s all shattered now. She touched me and now solitude feels like starvation.
What am I supposed to do with that?
I can’t go back to being half alive. Not after breathing her in and tasting a future in her mouth.
Cormac says to wait, but time is a luxury I don’t have. Now that I know what it feels like to wake up with her body warm against mine, I don’t know how to fucking wake up without her.
Now that I’ve seen the way she looks at me, like I’m something good, something worth choosing, every second she’s gone feels like punishment.
She hasn’t answered my calls or texts. Not a damn word. And God help me, I deserve her silence, but it’s killing me anyway.
I press a hand to my chest over the ache that never lets up.
I had her. I ruined it. And life without her tastes wrong now. Empty. Sharp around the edges.
So I stand outside her world another morning, heart in my hands, waiting like a fool for a woman who might never come back, because somehow… she became where I go to breathe.
I don’t know how to live in a world where she doesn’t love me anymore.
Not now. Not after that night. Not after I made her my forever in one stolen sunrise.
