He leaned his head back, throat exposed, and let the smoke pour from his lips like he was trying to exhale every ghost he’d ever loved.
I opened the door before I could think better of it. The screen creaked as it shut behind me, and Anthony’s eyes flicked to mine. Dark. Familiar. Not surprised just… there. Like he’d known I was coming.
“Didn’t mean to wake you,” he said, voice low, smoke roughening the edges.
“You didn’t.” I crossed my arms, trying to look relaxed. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Still?” He offered the cigarette like a peace treaty. I shook my head. He nodded and didn’t push. “You used to sleep like a rock when you were a kid.”
I sat down on the top step beside him, just far enough that our shoulders didn’t touch. “Not sure I remember what that feels like.”
A breeze rolled in off the coast, salt-heavy and cold. The kind of cold that felt good in your lungs, like it could scrape something clean inside you.
Anthony tapped the ash from the end of his cigarette. “Storm’s moving in tomorrow. You can feel it in the air. Tide’s been dragging hard all day. Pulling like it wants to take something with it.”
I watched the way the wind teased his hair, the way the smoke curled around him like it knew him. “You talk like the ocean’s alive.”
He smiled, faint and crooked. “It is. Always has been.”
The quiet between us settled like a blanket—not heavy, not suffocating. Just there. Real.
“I used to think about it sometimes,” I murmured. “What it’d feel like to just… vanish. Disappear into the water. No sound. No mess. Just… gone.”
His head turned toward me slowly, smoke trailing between us. “You still think about that?” he asked gently. No judgment in his features.
I shrugged, eyes fixed on the horizon. “Sometimes. Not in a dramatic way. More like… what would happen if I stopped existing. Would anyone even notice?”
“I’d notice,” he said immediately. Quiet and fierce.
I didn’t look at him. I wouldn’t have been able to hide the heat rising in my skin.
“I know you don’t let people in easily, Elliot,” Anthony said, voice barely above the wind. “But you don’t have to vanish to be safe.”
I swallowed hard, throat thick with everything I couldn’t say.
“I’m not trying to fix you,” he added. “I just… I want to be here. If you’ll let me.”
“I don’t know how,” I admitted.
He stubbed out the cigarette and leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. “Then let me show you.”
The porch creaked beneath us. The sky stretched out above. And for a moment—just one—I let myself believe he meant it. That I could have this. Him. The quiet. The ocean. The slow, careful way he looked at me like I was worth staying for.
Even if all I could think wasI want to vanish without anyone noticing,his presence said the opposite.
That maybe… someone was already watching the water for me. But I didn’t trust it.
Good things didn’t happen to me.
Everything I cared about eventually died.
CHAPTER 4
ANTHONY
Elliot was vanishing in pieces. Not all at once. There was no dramatic collapse, no midnight screams or broken glass. Just the slow bleed of absence: his fading voice, the untouched food, the hollow eyes that never quite looked at me anymore.
I saw it in the way his narrow shoulders curled inward, like he was trying to fold himself into a shadow. In how his sleeves swallowed his fidgeting hands. In the silence that used to mean comfort between us when he was a child, but now felt like a vacuum. Loud in all the wrong ways.
