Thin.
Liar.
The tears keep coming, unstoppable.
I am drunk.
I am unraveling.
I am terrified.
And I’ve never wanted him more.
Kai
Iplay her voicemail until my phone gets hot in my hand.
Then I play it again.
I’m sat on the floor of the shitty little house I’ve turned into a shrine, back against the peeling wall, legs stretched out in front of me, the glow from the screen cutting through the dark like a wound. The room smells like dust, old paper, cigarette smoke I don’t remember lighting, and her voice bleeding out of the speaker on repeat.
You came back.
Her first words. Broken. Slurred. Soaked in wine and regret.
Every time she says it, something inside my chest claws at the bars I welded around it in prison.
“I never fucking left,” I mutter under my breath, thumb hovering over the screen, ready to hit play again the second it ends.
The mattress shoved in the corner is unmade, sheets twisted like a body fought there. The walls around me are lined—floor to ceiling—with her. Photos. Newspaper clippings. Screen-printed screenshots. Still frames from security footage I shouldn’t have been able to get. A candid from the charity ball, pinned crookedabove my head; she’s smiling for a camera, eyes dead, Noah’s hand on the small of her back like he owns her spine.
He doesn’t even know what he’s touching.
None of them do.
The floor around me is chaos—envelopes, letters, ink-bleeding pages covered in her handwriting and mine, stacks of white cardboard boxes with evidence labels still half-stuck on them. A bottle sits uncapped by my ankle. I haven’t drunk any of it.
I don’t need alcohol.
I’ve got Scarlett.
God, Kai… I remember you touching me.
My head tips back against the wall with a dull thud.
I close my eyes.
I see her—drug-warm, soft, eyes half-lidded; the way her lips parted, the way she whispered my name like it was the only thing she had left. The way she shivered when I bit that mouth.
My jaw tightens until it hurts.
“I shouldn’t fucking want you,” I told her.
Lie.
I always wanted her.
The voicemail crackles on, her words spilling in that raw, unguarded way that makes me want to rip the world apart and make it listen.
