I felt sick.
Sick in a way that curled around my bones and stayed there, silent and rotting. Because I wasn’t supposed to want this.
Not from him. Not like this. Not with this kind of hunger—this desperate, clawing ache that made my chest tighten and my throat close up with guilt.
He was my dad’s best friend.
He’d known me since I was a kid.
Yet all I could think about was what it would feel like to put my hands on him. To be held. Touched. Ruined.
My stomach twisted. My skin crawled. I wished I could outrun the way my body had just betrayed me. The air buzzed around me, humming, alive with something electric and wrong. I braced my hand against the doorframe, but it didn’t ground me.
Nothing did.
Untethered, I was floating in this sick, confused place where grief and lust bled into each other until I couldn’t tell which was which anymore.
Maybe there was a hell for people like me. If there was—I’d been living in it since the day he came back. And the worst part? Some part of me never wanted to leave.
I curled in on myself like my body knew how to survive what my mind couldn’t. My journal was already open. I didn’t remember grabbing it—just that the ache in my chest needed a place to bleed.
My fingers moved without asking permission. Graphite dragging across the page like a blade across skin.
I drew his back first. The sharp slope of his spine, like something carved from stone. Then the tension in his jaw, how it locked when he was trying not to feel too much. And his eyes—God, his eyes—how they softened when he looked at me like I wasn’t just a broken thing he had to pretend to care about. Like I was someone.
Someone hesaw.
The towel. The water beading on his skin. The weight he carried like it belonged to him, like carrying mine too didn’t even register as a burden.
Each line on the page wasn’t just art—it was a confession. It was need. It was a prayer scratched in skin and silence. Itwasn’t just erotic. It was more than that. Holier than that. It wasworship.Sacred. Holy. Desperate.Wrong.
And still—I couldn’t stop.
Because if I was aroused, I was broken. And if I was broken… at least that made sense. At least the pain had shape. At least the ache had a name.
I flipped the page and started writing. The words didn’t come gently. They tore out of me, crooked and raw like bone breaking through skin.
Like me.
I think I’m disappearing.
Not in a poetic way. Not in the tragic, beautiful way that makes people cry at funerals. I mean literally—molecule by molecule. Like grief is eating me from the inside, and no one sees it. Not really. Not even when I scream in silence.
My dad looks at me like I’m a failed science experiment. Something that should’ve been stronger. Braver. Better. Like I was supposed to be made of steel instead of skin. Like loving Mom broke me in a way he didn’t plan for. He didn’t even look at me at the funeral. Like if he did, it would make her death real, and he’d have to deal with the son she left behind.
But Anthony did.My chest tightened as I remembered. He didn’t speak. He didn’t fill the silence. He juststayed. And Ithink that was the first time I let myself need someone. Let myself be small.
Everyone else drifted away. Avoided eye contact. Treated my grief like something contagious. But Anthony stayed.
I wondered if he only saw me because he felt guilty. Because I’m the last piece of her he can still protect. The dead woman’s kid. I didn’t want to be a burden. I didn’t want him to stay out of pity.
I wanted him to stay because he saw me. I wanted him to see me ashis.
The one he’d fight for. The one he’d stay for. Because there was no one else left who wanted to fight for me.
A single tear dripped down my cheek and splashed onto the paper. I wiped it away with the side of my hand, smearing graphite across my palm and cheek like warpaint. Pressed the heel of my hand into my chest, trying to quiet the panic crawling up my throat. Trying to stop it before it became something worse. The scream I knew would never come out right.
I think about ending it.
