"You taught me how." His face changing.
"I don't need you to protect me." His hand dropping.
"I can handle it." The temperature plunging.
Why did my strength scare him? Why did becoming like him drive him away?
The old narrative surfaces, familiar as breathing. Poisonous. Reliable.
Everyone leaves.
Gabriel left for God and guilt. My mother left through death. My father retreated behind disappointment. Gunner retreated to be Nico’s best fucking friend. Logan retreated behind doubt. And now Nico, who held me through nightmares, who threw a man into rocks for touching my arm, who came inside me while looking into my eyes, is behind a closed door.
I'm the common denominator. The thing people eventually can't stay near. The disaster they grow tired of managing. Or maybe, and this thought cuts deepest, the emptiness they see when I stop performing.
I don't understand what I triggered in him. Don't understand why my competence became a weapon turned back on us both. All I know is that I'm sitting here in the gathering dark, confused and alone, while the only person I had left has withdrawn completely.
Three AM. The penthouse is dark except for city lights bleeding through windows. Miami still pulses below. Neon promises, bass from distant clubs, the city that never sleeps even when everything in it is dying. The humidity presses against the glass, and I can taste salt air, but there's no cinnamon anymore. No gun oil. Just the expensive nothing of an empty space.
My hand raises toward his door. Three times I almost knock. Three times I pull back. What would I say?I'm sorry for becoming strong? Please want me even though I'm empty now? Come back and be the man who made me believe I was worth staying for?
The words would die in my throat anyway. The chaos goblin who would have made a joke, who would have called him Tactical Banana and demanded he stop being ridiculous, she's extinct. What's left doesn't know how to bridge this distance.
I haven't moved from the couch in hours. Can't sleep. Can't cry. Can't feel anything except this spreading numbness, ice forming over everything that used to burn.
On one side of that wall, the man who made me believe I was worth staying for. Who showed me what it felt like to be wanted, claimed, kept. On the other side, me. Apparently proving I wasn't worth it after all.
I don't cry. That would require feeling something, and I turned that off hours ago. The numbness is complete now, spreading through me like winter. Everything that made me myself, the chaos, the warmth, the woman who grabbed his cock on a boat just to see him lose control, all of it extinct. Frozen. Gone.
The laptop sits closed on the coffee table. All those lists, all that strategy. What's the point? I did everything right. Became strong, tactical, self-sufficient. Became what he is. And it drove him away.
Maybe that's my real talent. Not the chaos goblin act, not the party girl performance. My real talent is becoming exactly what people don't want. My brother needed innocence; I gave him complicity. My father needed strength; I gave him weakness. Nico needed… what? The mess? The vulnerability? The woman who needed saving?
I'll never know now. He's gone. Not physically, but in every way that matters.
I pull my knees to my chest, making myself smaller on the vast couch. The silk of my dress is cold against my skin. Everything is cold now. Even the memory of his heat inside me feels distant, like something I dreamed or saw in a movie about other people.
The silence stretches on. Empty. Final. Complete.
26 - Nico
“You taught me how.”
The words play on repeat, an audio file my brain won't delete. Her voice, flat and professional, sounds too much like someone else's. Sofia's voice, a lifetime ago: "You made me into this. You taught me to be hard, to be a weapon. Are you proud of what I became?"
Different women. Same cadence. Same accusation. Same architect.
I get up at 5 AM. Pull-ups on the bathroom doorframe because there's no bar in here. The rhythm is familiar, the only language my body trusts. At two hundred and eighty-six, I stop. Not because of the pain. Because I hear her moving in the kitchen.
Making coffee. Her terrible coffee that tastes sweet and milky like runny custard, but I'd drink gallons of it if it meant things were normal between us.
I shower cold, dress in black, open the guest room door like I'm breaching enemy territory.
She's at the kitchen island. Laptop open. Coffee steaming. The kitchen still smells like her: vanilla and that coconut lotion she uses. It's soaked into everything. Into me. She's wearing my t-shirt, the one she stole days ago when she still called me Horse Man and made jokes about my tactical everything, and nothing else beneath it. I can tell by the way it clings. My cock stirs despite everything, and I hate myself for the want that won't die even as I kill everything else.
The sight makes my chest tight.
She looks up. Searches my face for something. The man who held her through nightmares, who kissed her on a rooftop, who came apart inside her whispering her name.
