Two words. Spoken to the bathroom door. Delivered without looking back, without softening, without the emotional elaboration that the moment probably deserves and that I categorically cannot afford.
I know you didn’t want to leave.
I’ve always known.
That’s what made it worse.
The bathroom door closes between us.
And I press my back against its surface, feeling the wood solid and cool through Oakley’s borrowed flannel, and I stare at the floor. The shower still sits in the corner where it witnessed my breakdown hours ago, the tiles still carrying the faint dampness of water and towel and muffled screaming. The medicine cabinet is closed. The mirror reflects nothing because I’m below its line of sight, sitting against a door in a bathroom ina town that isn’t mine, wearing a shirt that isn’t mine, carrying a conversation in my chest that shouldn’t be mine but is.
I close my eyes.
Take a breath.
Then another.
Slow. Measured. The kind of controlled respiration that I use to tame my heart rate after tactical exercises, after confrontations, after the specific cardiac event that occurs when Roman Kade says my name in that voice and means it.
I know the truth.
I’ve carried it for a decade, tucked into the same locked compartment where I keep every other thing I’m too stubborn to process and too honest to forget.
But the truth doesn’t change what took place.
Doesn’t rewrite history. Doesn’t undo the morning I packed a box and walked out of an academy that had been my whole world. Doesn’t erase the three hundred miles that turned into three thousand, then into years, then into the specific, calcified distance that exists between two people who never said goodbye because goodbye would have required admitting there was something worth grieving.
Doesn’t remove the immense, suffocating, bone-deep loneliness of being alone once more. Of building a career on the foundation of “I don’t need anyone” and discovering, year by year, that the foundation holds the weight of the structure but can’t fill the rooms.
It doesn’t solve anything.
So why continue beating a dead horse?
CHAPTER 10
A Table Set For Four
~HAZEL~
“Now why are you shirtless?”
Oakley’s voice filters through the bathroom door with the exasperated clarity of a man who has already been managing situations this morning and has just encountered one more.
I’m standing at the sink, toothbrush in hand, my reflection staring back at me through the medicine cabinet mirror with the hollow-eyed assessment of a woman cataloguing the damage. The dark circles have deepened overnight—bruise-purple now, the kind that concealer can cover but can’t cure. My skin has regained some of its olive warmth, the alarming pallor of last night retreating enough to suggest that whatever Oakley administered is doing its job, but the overall effect is still a woman running on insufficient fuel. The icy blue hair is damp from the shower I’d taken—warm this time, therapeutic rather than punitive—falling around my face in waves that I haven’t yet wrestled into regulation compliance.
I’m wearing my own clothes for the first time in whatever disorienting hours have elapsed since my blackout. A charcoal henley, long-sleeved, soft enough that the fabric doesn’t aggravate the tender skin where I’d scratched during last night’s episode. Dark joggers. No shoes, because this is my apartment and the only territory I’m claiming this morning is the twelve inches between my bare feet and the bathroom tile.
Oakley’s flannel is folded on the counter behind me.
I’ll return it. After it’s laundered. After his scent has been washed out of the fabric so I can hand it back without carrying the memory of how it smelled when I woke up in it—candied blood orange and cinnamon bark, warm as a fireplace, safe in a way that clothing has no business being.
But the thing that’s pulling me out of my own head and toward the closed door is not the bickering.
It’s the smell.
Eggs. Butter sizzling in a pan. The deep, smoky aroma of bacon rendering its fat against a heated surface. Toast—actual toast, the kind that comes from bread placed in a functioning toaster rather than the sad, room-temperature variety that passes for breakfast at gas stations. And beneath it all, threading through the food scents like a bass note beneath a melody—coffee. Fresh. Rich. The unmistakable fragrance of beans that were ground recently enough to still carry their oils.
Someone is cooking in my kitchen.
