I pushed through the bathroom door like a man trying to shove his skin back on, too tight, raw, wrong. But there she was. Right in front of me. Eyes still wide, laced with fear as her hands shook, gripping onto something familiar.
Fuck, my jacket. I forgot it. Her note was in there, too; I hope it didn’t fall out when she picked it up. Or worse, I hope she didn’t take it out, thinking I didn’t deserve it anymore.
Aly was a few feet behind her, eyes burning a hole into me. Her posture said a hundred things without a sound:Don’t. Don’t you dare.Miles’s jaw was tight. Matthew stood like a statue about to move.How fucking dare they… how dare they think they can protect her better than—shit. I don’t even have the right to say me.Especially after what I did minutes earlier.
But they… they don’t know her. They met her this week; I knew her from when she came, when she stepped foot intoSilverwood.Even Aly, even she can’t—fuck. I can’t accept this shit.What happened to us? Just us and no one else? Why are people coming into her life and taking her from me?
My hands—my stupid, filthy hands—wanted to grab her, to take her into whatever safety I had left. Instead, I watched her lift the hoodie, watched her fingers brush the fabric where my chest would be.
The sight should have softened me. Her gentleness should have been a knife of shame I could use to cut myself into better—better for her. But the feeling that rose was not tenderness. It was something knotted and ugly and animal that I hated myself for smelling.
She held the hoodie out. Her voice might have said something—I couldn’t hear it—but the way her lips moved made me want to memorise the shape of the words. My throat tightened as if preparing to swallow something poisonous.
I took the hoodie from her hand. The fabric smelled like her now. Detergent and a sort of ordinary kindness I hadn’t earned.
I glanced back for a second and saw that Miles, fucking Miles, shifted, like he wanted to step forward and put himself between us. Like he always has to be her fucking protector. If it were someone else—Matthew, if it was fucking Matthew, then I wouldn’t care as much, but Miles? A guy who would use her, add her to his list of toys and move on?Fuck no.
My jaw worked. Heat flared in my chest. She was being nice. Still. After everything. After the ball. After the mud. After the humiliation I had built into her life. She was still being kind.
Everything inside me clattered. The man I used to be, small, desperate, tidy with his hate, wanted to tear that kindness to shreds to prove that nothing soft could last. The other part of me, the part I never let anyone see, felt like it would break if she smiled again at anyone who wasn’t me.
So I said it because saying anything softer would have been dangerous. Because if I said sorry, I’d admit I’d crossed a line. If I asked her to stay, I’d be begging. If I kept quiet, I might wither into some hollow man, and I couldn’t bear that either.
“You’re a pathetic saint,” I said, and the words were flat, bitter, precise. Not loud enough to draw the whole field, but not quiet either. Enough for them to register, enough for her skin to prick.
I saw immediate confusion flash across her face, hurt mixed with the same bewildered kindness she could never seem to stop offering. She didn’t look angry. She looked stunned, like she couldn’t reconcile my cruelty with whatever she’d expected back.
I didn’t wait for an answer. I turned my back because staying would mean saying something else, something worse, something I couldn’t take back. Walking away was the safest humiliation I could give myself, remove myself from her immediate world so maybe she could breathe again, even if my chest hollowed with the sound of loss.
I kept walking until the distance swallowed my weight and left me with nothing but the taste of the knowledge that in trying to cage her life to protect myself, I’d only taught myself how to bruise what I wanted most.
Chapter Twelve
Aurora
As a psychology student, I was starting to realise something ugly, something no textbook wanted to admit. Sometimes people are broken in ways you can’t fix.
And Joshua?
He was starting to look like a case study I wouldn’t survive.
Chapter Thirteen
Joshua
I leaned back into the couch, head tipped against the wall, the sound of brushes scratching against canvas filling the room.
Jennie’s giggles blended with Alex’s soft hums as he concentrated, both of them bent over their easels like the world began and ended with those strokes of colour.
But mine? My world was stuck on the bleachers.
Onher.
I could still see her, those wide, startled eyes when the ball slammed into the metal by her head.
The flinch.
The yelp.
