No "landed."
No "you alive?"—the usual joke he sent only half-joking, the one that meant I'm thinking about you, I'm checking on you, you matter.
Silence.
An entire universe of silence stretching between London and New York like an ocean I couldn't cross.
I opened my chat with Lucy instead, thumbs hovering over the keyboard, heart beating too loud in my ears.
Have you talked to Drogo?
The words stared back at me from the message box, simple and damning.
I imagined her answer before she could give it.
Yes.
No.
What happened?
Why?
But underneath all of it, a different terror slithered in through the cracks in my composure—if I asked, it meant I was admitting something had happened. That the sex the other night—the touches, the closeness, the way his voice had broken when he said my name, the way he'd held me after like I was something precious—might not have meant what I thought it did.
Maybe it was nothing for him. Just scratching an itch he'd been ignoring for seventeen years. Maybe the word mine meant something different for him.
Maybe it was just another almost-thing in a lifetime of almosts, another night that would fade into awkward silence and forced normalcy.
My throat closed up.
I deleted the text before I could send it. Not because Lucy wouldn't understand—she would, she'd been watching us dance around each other for years. Because I couldn't stand the possibility that she'd reply with something gentle and pitying like "He's probably just busy" or "Give him time." I didn't want gentle. I wanted answers. And if the answer was that last night meant nothing to him… I'd rather bleed than hear it out loud.
The sting came a second later—hot, sharp, burning up my spine like a brand.
I gasped, arching forward in my chair.
Another scratch carved itself just beneath my shoulder blade, fire and ice and shame in one long deliberate line. My eyes filled before I could stop them. Tears slipped down my cheeks, useless and quiet and frustrating.
"I'm writing," I whispered to the empty room, voice cracking. "I'm writing, I swear."
The whispers didn't care. They never did.
They weren't just impatient anymore either. They sounded almost smug, satisfied in a way that made my skin crawl.
"He left you," one hissed, low and delighted, words scraping against the inside of my skull. "He always leaves."
I typed harder, fingers slamming the keys, ignoring the lie even as it burrowed deeper. But the next scratch came faster, deeper, as if punishing me for hoping. As if they could smell my weakness, my fear, my desperate need for him to be okay.
So I kept typing. Hours vanished into the rhythm of keystrokes and pain. My tea went cold, skin forming on the surface. My back curled tighter, shoulders hunching to protect wounds that wouldn't stop bleeding. Words spilled like blood on snow—dark, stark, impossible to take back.
When my hands finally stopped shaking enough to trust them, I stood—legs weak, head buzzing with exhaustion and wine and panic—and walked to the kitchen.
The sandwich was still there.
His sandwich.
Wrapped carefully in plastic, cut into triangles the way he always did because he'd rolled his eyes when I said they tasted better that way and then made every sandwich triangular since. Idiot. Perfect, infuriating, missing idiot.
