My eyes are puffy, my head dull and heavy, and my body feels like I spent the night being dragged behind a truck emotionally. But underneath all of that is something worse.
Restlessness.
It’s crawling under my skin like an itch I can’t reach. My thoughts are jittery, my legs twitchy. I want to pace. Or scream. Or—God,something.
I toss off the blanket and sit up, blinking at the mess of clothes I never unpacked. My suitcase is still mostly zipped. My phone is face-down on the nightstand.
I don’t reach for it. I don’t want to scroll.
I try to read instead. I pick up one of the paperbacks Nina stacked beside the bed like comfort food, but the words slide off my brain like water on glass.
Too much noise in my head.
Too muchAshin my head.
I stand, then sit, then stand again. My body doesn’t know what it wants. My heart definitely doesn’t. All I know is I can’t keep holding all of this in. It’s pressing against my ribs like something sharp and urgent.
I spot my laptop in my tote bag on the floor.
For a second, I just stare at it.
I ended the last chapter with my heroine standing at a crossroads: between the safe choice and the risky one. Between the guy who makes sense and the guy who makes herfeel.
Now I know exactly what I will write next.
I pull the laptop out, plug it in, and sit cross-legged on the bed with the screen glowing faintly in the early light.
I place my fingers on the keys. And the words pour out.
Like a dam breaking.
Like I’ve been holding back a flood and now it’s crashing through me, fast and relentless andhonest.
My heroine sits on the edge of a hotel bed in Paris, mascara smudged, heart cracked in places she didn’t know existed. The man she thought might be different—the man who made her laugh and touched her like she was sacred—walked away from her.
He made her feel like too much and not enough all at once.
Too complicated to love. Too easy to leave.
She didn’t expect forever.
She just thought maybe… she’d be worthstaying for.
I type until my fingers ache. I don’t stop to think, don’t stop to edit. Just bleed onto the page, line after line of heartbreak and hope and all the things I didn’t say out loud.
Every moment from the past few days is there, disguised in fiction but so clearlymine.
The words won’t stop. They keep coming, one after the other, faster than I can process. I’m writing like a woman possessed. Or maybe like a woman trying to survive. Because that’s what this is now—writing my way out of the wreckage.
Hours pass, but I barely register them. The only way I know they’re moving is by the way the sunlight shifts across the floor and the number at the bottom of my Word doc that keeps climbing. One page becomes ten. Then twenty. Then thirty-five.
My laptop is hot against my thighs. My fingers ache. There’s a growing dent in the cushion where I’ve been sitting cross-legged all day, my body stiff and sore—but I don’t care.
Nina came in earlier with a tray of snacks. Crackers and grapes and slices of cheese she cut into stars because she knows I forget to eat when I’m like this. She didn’t say anything, just kissed the top of my head, set it down, and left me to it.
I haven’t touched the food.
There are three coffee mugs on the nightstand now. Two half-full, one empty. I don’t remember making the second or the third, but my veins are buzzing with caffeine and adrenaline and something that might be grief, or clarity, or both.
