Margot chose me. But Margot chooses everyone. That's who she is. She'd choose a stray dog. A broken lamp. She sees damage and reaches for it.
I want someone to choose me who doesn't choose everyone. Someone selective. Someone difficult. Someone who looks at me and decides I'm worth the effort even though I'm complicated and damaged and scared.
I'm probably asking too much.
I'm definitely asking too much.
I flip back a few pages, my heart pounding in my throat.
Margot came today.
She's different. She looks at me like I'm a person. Not a case file. Not a charity project.
She looks at me like I matter.
It's terrifying.
Because if I let myself believe it—if I let myself think someone actually sees me and chooses me anyway—and then she leaves...
I don't think I'd survive it.
I've survived Linda. Six homes in four years. The pills and the hiding.
But I don't think I could survive being chosen and then unchosen.
So I'll keep my bag by the door.
Just in case.
I put the notebook down. My eyes are burning. My chest is a wreck—cracked open, exposed, the careful armor I wear peeled back to reveal something underneath that I don't have a name for.
This is a boy who wants to be chosen. Who's spent his entire life being returned, recycled, reshuffled—a human library book nobody kept past the due date. And he wrote it down in a notebook he hid at the bottom of a chest because even his wanting felt like too much to ask the world to hold.
And I looked at this person and saw something totake.
I pick up the brown notebook I brought with me. The current one. Flip forward past the entries I've already read. Past the suppressants. Past the kitchen. Looking for—
I find it.
The entry is short. The handwriting is different—shaky, uneven, pressed hard into the paper like the pen was a weapon and the page was the only safe thing to stab.
I let Zero fuck me in the basement.
The opening line hits like a car wreck. My name again. In that sentence. In his handwriting. In his private diary.
The next line is crossed out—hard, violent scratches of ink—and rewritten:
No—that's not right. It wasn't "letting." He didn't ask. I didn't say yes. But I didn't say no either. I just stood there when I should have run. Why didn't I run?
He bent me over a weight bench and took my virginity while acting like I was nothing. That I was just an omega. Just a body. Just a hole to use.
And I came.
I came while he fucked me like a pathetic fuck toy. While he held me down. While he hurt me.
The handwriting changes here. Shaky. Jagged. The letters crooked like the pen was shaking in his hand.
I don't understand what's wrong with me. Normal people don't want this. Normal people would have fought back or screamed or done SOMETHING.
