Jace snorts from the kitchen. “She’s got you pegged.”
“I hate both of you,” I mutter.
“You don’t.” Eris smiles wider. “Just keep playing into the tragic poet aesthetic…”
She’s right.
I could never hate her.
I’m already gone.
Addicted.
It’s the questions and teasing. The way she doesn’t take shit without pressing back and testing us… She doesn’t accept attention without examining it first. She challenges us just enough to keep us on our toes.
Our ex wants to reclaim a past that’s no longer an option.
Eris doesn’t live in the past or even seem to care about our ex. She seamlessly made the woman irrelevant without even knowing her name.
She’s here… calling me tragic. Rewriting the shape of our home without raising her voice or demanding recognition. Acting like nothing and everything happened at once.
And I find myself thinking about permanence.
Not the soft kind.
The kind that doesn’t ask permission.
It just sticks.
“You’re staring again,” she murmurs, fingers still dancing across the keys.
“I’m allowed.”
“Are you?” Her tone is teasing. “Since when?”
I meet her playful gaze. “I’ve earned it.”
Something shifts between us as she regards me. Just slightly, but it’s there.
Understanding.
Maybe acceptance.
She knows what this is turning into.
And she’s crazy enough to stay.
Everything is happening too fast, and somehow, not fast enough.
That should feel like a contradiction… Instead, it feels like the most honest thing about this entire situation.
I keep thinking about how I should be panicking. Calling Roo. Rebuilding my mental walls brick by brick. Yet, I’m curled into a couch that might be illegally comfortable, in a loft I don’t want to leave, trying not to picture what it would feel like to let all three of them ruin me slowly, deliberately, and without apology.
I’m spiraling, but it doesn’t feel like plunging to my death.
It feels like landing safely on my feet.
The quiet settles in after the chaos, warm and earned. It’s the type of silence that comes after something survives a natural disaster. Or like a hoodie pulled on straight from the dryer. Or that voice sayingyou’re still hereafter a catastrophe.
