The belt buckle was gone.
I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until it rushed out of me, shaky and relieved. Because I’d given him something that wasn’t just metal and etching. I’d given him a piece of him. And if he’d taken it with him—if he’d thought to take it at all—that meant he hadn’t walked out like last night was a mistake.
He’d walked out because he was Wyatt.
Because he processed things with movement and distance and quiet.
Because emotion hit him like artillery and he’d been trained to take cover, not let himself stand in the open and get obliterated.
Because sometimes the safest place for him had always been alone.
I pressed my fingers to the empty velvet lining and let myself feel the smallest, strangest bloom of pride.
He took it.
He wanted it.
He kept it.
I closed the box and set it down carefully, as if I was handling a fragile truth.
Then I went back to the bed, sat on the edge, and tried to hear my own thoughts without amplifying the ones that wanted to scream.
A younger version of me would’ve spiraled. She would’ve read his absence like a verdict. She would’ve convinced herself she’d been too much, too fast, too hungry.
But I wasn’t her anymore.
I’d walked across the Ravenel Bridge with my throat full of panic and survived it.
I’d looked at my own grief—Jonesy’s absence, my mother’s erasures—and held it without drowning.
I’d gone to dinner with a man who could break me and told him the truth, anyway.
I didn’t lose my worth because a man needed space to catch up to his own feelings.
If anything, it made me like him more—not the leaving, but the fact that he felt it that intensely. Because last night had been real. It hadn’t been neat or easy or polite. It had been messy in the way real things are messy.
He needed a minute.
So, I gave him one.
I showered slowly, letting the warm water rinse away the haze, washing off the perfume and the candle smoke and the lingering sweetness of the night. I took my time moisturizing, brushing out my hair, putting on clothes that felt like me again—soft linen shorts, a tank top, sandals.
When I caught my reflection in the mirror, my eyes snagged on the side of my neck.
A mark.
Not dramatic. Not theatrical. Just a bruise blooming beneath the skin like a secret.
I touched it gently, my pulse skipping.
My first instinct was to smile.
My second was to roll my eyes at myself because it was ridiculous to be so pleased about something that would’ve embarrassed me at twenty.
But I wasn’t twenty.
And I was done being embarrassed about wanting.
