So I’ve learned to be alone.
Alone is predictable.
Alone doesn’t leave you standing there with your hands empty, wondering what you did wrong.
But then there’s Vesper.
She burst into my life loudly.The way she does everything—bright, sarcastic, too fast, laughing at the wrong moments, and somehow making those moments survivable anyway.Like she could talk her way through any locked door, like the universe would eventually get tired of resisting her and just let her in.
She got under my skin.
Like a compass.A pull that has always been there—and I just kept pretending it wasn’t.Until she became my Vesper.
God, even thinking that feels dangerous.Possessive.Ridiculous.And still—true in a way my bones recognize.
It isn’t just that I love her.
It’s that my body knows her.My brain knows her.The part of me that doesn’t speak, the part that only reacts, knows her with the certainty of the tide.
She is the one person I can’t shake, because losing her isn’t a possibility I can tolerate.
It would break me—living like this.
Skirting the edges of her life.Existing in fragments.A call.A text.A visit that ends too soon.I tell myself it’s enough because it has to be.Because I don’t know how to stand next to her every day without falling apart.
When I lived in Boston, I drove to her in New York more times than I admitted to anyone.Sometimes because her voice changed, just a fraction, and I couldn’t rest until I saw her breathing in front of me.Other times because I needed to feel her hand in mine for ten minutes and pretend that was a life.
But now it’s different.
Now everything is closer.Louder.Impossible to ignore.
And then there’s Callaway.
He knows how to survive a family—despite the fact his is four assholes with a mission statement: ruin his day.The man knows how to take up space without apology, and how to make people feel seen right where they are.
Right now he’s with Ves, being ...what?
Comfort, warmth, someone who understands her?He’s good at it, filling empty spaces, making you feel like you belong in that moment, with him.
It’s something that hooked me the moment I met him.He made the impossible possible while I was around him.Camp became a safe space I wanted to be in because I could be a part of something.
He made me believe I could breathe there.That I wasn’t just tolerated.
And then I fell in love with him.
And her.
And we fucked everything up beyond repair.
I’m staring out the living room window, city lights blurring together, when I hear footsteps.
“I knew someone was thinking way too loud out here.”
I don’t turn.
“You okay, big guy?”
“Don’t call me that,” I mutter.I don’t have the energy to unpack why it still gets under my skin.
