I watched Elliot pull back from me like he was something fragile I’d already broken. Like glass that had finally realized it was shattered. He folded in on himself—shame, fear, apology—all because of me. My heart kicked once, hard and wrong, like it had slammed into something solid. Heat rushed through me andthen drained just as fast, leaving a hollow, buzzing cold behind my ribs.
Words turned to ash on my tongue. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t disgusted. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t wrong. I wanted to tell him it was too much—not because he was, but because I was.
But I couldn’t speak. I could have reached for him. I could have closed the distance he’d already started to build. My hands even twitched as if they might.
But fear got there first, quick and efficient and cruel.
The darkness closed in. The air went thin, sharp in my lungs. Pain burned white-hot through my chest as the truth landed fully formed:
I had failed him.
The kindest thing I could do now was leave before I hurt him again. That was the lie I told myself. That leaving was mercy. That disappearing from him was somehow less cruel than staying and wanting what I wasn’t allowed to want. I didn’t remember walking away. I didn’t remember leaving the beach. I only remember the sound of the ocean behind me—relentless, endless—and the feeling of something tearing loose in my chest as I went. And the way his breath hitched when I pulled away. The sound of it followed me longer than the waves did.
By the time I realized I was no longer on sand, that my feet were on hard gravel and grit instead of wet earth, I was standing beside my truck outside the house.
Breath wouldn’t come. My lungs screamed for it. I suffocated on my guilt.
I tore the door open, slammed it shut again, threw it into reverse, and peeled down the driveway with no destination. Just the animalistic need to escape whatever I’d become.
I’d promised to protect him. And all I’d managed to do was become another person who hurt him. I didn’t go to Jax’sbecause I wanted to drink. I went because I didn’t know what else to do with the weight of that inside my body.
Time warped and lost all meaning. Hours collapsed into something shapeless and thin as the world passed by in a meaningless blur.
When I finally pulled up outside Jax’s—the dive bar just outside town—the sky was still black and the neon sign flickered like a dying pulse.
Liquor laws never seemed to apply here. This was where people came to hide. To drown their shame quietly in cheap whiskey and bad decisions.
And that was exactly what I intended to do.
I thought about calling Thomas as I locked the truck, but I couldn’t face his judgment. Couldn’t take theI told you sothat would sit behind every word he said.
He’d warned me. He’d told me I couldn’t fix the past. That I couldn’t replace what I’d lost with something fragile and doomed and aching. That I was building a future on a fault line.
I hadn’t listened.
And now Elliot was paying for it.
The fear that had taken hold when Elliot disappeared for hours that night—when he wouldn’t answer his phone, wouldn’t text back—still hadn’t released me. It sat under my skin, coiled and poisonous. I kept thinking of how small he’d sounded when he apologized. Like he thought needing someone was a failure.
His depression was like the ocean. It came in waves. Relentless. Pulling him under again and again.
And I’d just given it another reason.
What should have been a tender moment had curdled into something sharp and bitter. Not because of him. Because of me.
Because I was afraid I wasn’t enough. Afraid I couldn’t be the safe place he needed. Afraid that if I was, he would stop beingable to survive without me—and that I wouldn't survive being needed like that. I proved it with my silence.
Jax’s was dim, washed in broken red neon and smoke so thick it burned the eyes. A girl who looked barely old enough to vote swayed on the stage, eyes empty, body offered like a transaction. Men folded bills into her waistband like she wasn’t human.
Bile rose in my throat at the sight. I turned away before I could do anything I’d regret and took the only empty seat at the bar.
It was almost two in the morning, but places like this were never empty. The bartender didn’t ask my name when he stopped cleaning the sticky surface in front of me. Didn’t ask what I wanted. Just slid a glass in front of me.
I stared at it like it possessed the power to solve all my problems. The words slipped out before I could stop them. “Why didn’t you tell me it would be him?”
The bartender paused. Not just because the question surprised him but because it wasn’t meant for him.
A voice from two seats down answered instead. “Because no one ever thinks it’s going to be the one that ruins them,” he said. “It’s always the one that feels like home.”
