I was shaking with fury as I stared him down.
Caiden snapped his head towards me. “You want to know why? I wanted to test my hatred for you, and I wanted to see what Dante saw in you. I wanted to see why the fuck he thought you were worth ruining his friendship with me. I wanted to fucking ruin you, to break you.”
“Did it work?” I asked.
“Yeah. I do fucking hate you. I don’t know why the fuck Dante likes you and why he risked it all to be with you.” Caiden stared at me with an expression of pure deadliness and rage.
“I hope you rot,” I whispered, my words carried away on the wind like a forlorn wish.
“Real mature, Amelia,” he said with a sneer, turning to walk away.
“Don’t you walk away from me!” I screeched, my voice cracking with fury.
In a fit of desperation, I tore off one of my heels and hurled it at him, following suit with the other, heedless of the wide-eyed stares from the growing crowd.
I must have looked like a woman unhinged, a spectacle of raw emotion laid bare in the open.
“Piece of shit!” I yelled, watching him disappear into the sea of people, my shoes lying abandoned and dirty on the ground.
In that moment, I blamed him for everything.
I hadn’t received my apology, and now I felt like a fool –
Barefoot and humiliated.
My last shred of dignity lay in walking through the crowd without collapsing into a whirlwind of tears.
It hurt to know he didn’t care enough to say sorry. It hurt that my mother wasn’t here to comfort me, to assure me that everything would be okay.
What was wrong with him? Could he be the devil in disguise?
I left the school, refusing to look back. Insteadof driving home, I headed to the park near my neighborhood. Once free from his presence, the weight of my actions settled on me.
“Why do I always do that?” I muttered to myself, feeling pathetic as I sank beneath a tree. I watched the swings sway in the wind, creaking with emptiness, like the void inside me.
I didn’t cry. I thought I would, but nothing came.
“I’m sorry, Lillian,” I whispered, feeling like I had let her down. I couldn’t even manage to extract an apology from Caiden.
Perhaps if my mother had apologized, Lillian would have returned home, and we wouldn’t be trapped in this dismal reality.
Her spirit would always haunt me, her voice echoing in my dreams.
Closing my eyes, I let myself drift away like a leaf. In this moment, I longed to run alongside wolves, feeling connected to their souls as they searched for a place to call home. I wished to soar with doves, to flutter my lovely feathers.
I wished to be anywhere but here.
I could leave and forget all of this. Caiden would become a lost memory. Who cared if he didn’t care? All that mattered was right here, right now. Everything had happened, and I could not control the stitches of time.
My sister was dead; there was a hole in my heart, and my mother may as well have been dead too. I wondered what she was doing, perhaps sitting by her window, lost in her drugs? I envisioned driving up to my house, seeing her haunted reflection in the glass.
Sitting there, I cleared my head and sank into a warm paradise.
I would survive. I would thrive. I repeated the mantra to myself. Caiden did not matter. Nobody was to blame. I had to keep telling myself that; otherwise, I would be pointing fingers for the rest of my life.
The thought of Caiden made my blood boil, but I had to release that anger if I wanted to live a happy, stable life.
Hatred was like love, yet the opposite. It’s an intense, blazing sensation that bubbled within and consumed.
