Morealwaysfollow.
My vision blurs until the door is nothing but a smear.
“Fuck this.” My voice comes out cracked and pathetic. “Fuckyou.”
But the tears don’t listen. They never fucking listen. They just keep coming, faster and harder, and suddenly I’m not crying anymore.
I’m sobbing—ugly, gasping, heaving sobs that rack my whole body and steal my breath and make me sound like a dying animal.
“No! You don’t get to do this to me!” I scream at the empty room, at the door, at the mental snapshot of Kai as he left. “Not again!”
The words dissolve into another sob. And God, I hate him all over again, bright and hot and vicious as the day I sent that angry letter.
Rage burns through the heartbreak so fast it leaves me dizzy.
“You don’t get to make meneedyou and then just fucking—just fuckingl-l-leave?—“
I grab an empty beer bottle and hurl it at the wall with everything I have. The explosion of glass is so satisfying that I’m reaching for another bottle before the first one’s finished falling. I shriek Kai’s name like a banshee as it shatters, and then I’m grabbing the pizza box and flinging it at the TV, grabbing the textbooks and hurling them across the room, their pages fluttering like panicked birds.
Piaget can gofuckhimself.
Midterms can gofuckthemselves.
Bastian, Kai and his mother, Kruger, Melissa, and everyone else who has someone when I have no one—they canallgofuckthemselves.
I rip my notes to shreds, first with my hands, then with my teeth, and I’m still screaming, still crying, snot and tears streaming down my face as I destroy everything I can reach, ignoring the warning ache in my foot, ignoring the way I’m suffocating, as if Kai’s squeezing, squeezing, because I need to break more, break everything, destroy every piece of this fake fucking bullshit I pretended was real?—
Hair flies into my face. My fingers catch on the butterfly necklace as I claw the strands out of my eyes.
I freeze, choking back a strangled sound that’s half cough, half sob.
The chain is delicate and warm against my throat, the butterfly’s little silver wings digging into my fingers as I grip it tight.
Three years he kept this, even though he hated me the entire time for leaving.
That’s a long time to hate someone.
No wonder leaving comes so easy.
I rip it off.
The chain bites into my neck before it snaps, and I cock my arm back to throw it into the wreckage with everything else—but my body won’t move. I’m standing there shaking, the broken necklace clutched in my shaking fist, but I can’t do it.
I can’t fucking do it.
“Pathetic, Miss H,” I hiss, spittle flying out of my mouth. “Utterly fucking pathetic.”
My knees give out.
I sink to the floor in the middle of the destruction, defeated.
Even my tears have stopped—now that I’ve burned through the rage, there’s nothing left to fuel them. I’ve got nothing left. Just the bile-bitter knowledge that I did this to myself.
Every step I took led me here, to this exact moment.
To this shell of a room.
To this shell of a life.
