I huff, already out of breath. My lungs burn, and I welcome the ache, but I grab hold of the sides of the machine for support. “Are you gossiping about me to your family?”
“Me?Gossip? I wouldnever...”
“He texted the group chat a hundred times the other day. You would have known that if you didn’t keep removing yourself from it.”
“Ha-ha,” Ian scratches the side of his head and has the decency to look a little sheepish. “It wasn’t ahundred.”
“How is that going?” Warren asks, but he says it in a way like he already fucking knows. He looks at me like he does, too.
“If you’re not here in the morning,kitten, I will never speak to you again in this life. Do you understand?”
I suck in a ragged breath, jumping to the sides of the treadmill. I hang my head between my shoulders, waiting for my lungs to stop burning or my chest to loosen or my fucked up thoughts to stop spiraling.
“Great,” I rasp.
Warren snorts.
Ian grimaces.
Kit
Bowen didn’t wake up to me gone, but I woke up to him gone.
Still.
I paced the cabin. Cried over a plate of spaghetti when I realized he had plated two, even when he wouldn’t acknowledge me. I blared his music, like it would be a calling beacon to lure the beast back home. I smoked one of his cigarettes on the porch and damn near hacked up a lung. Wouldn’t recommend.
I stayed up on the couch until my eyelids drooped, and I couldn’t hold them open any longer.
He never came back home.
I know this because I’m looking at his empty bed right now.
His bedroom smells like him more than any other part of the place. His sheets are soft cotton, black like he pretends his soul is. I groan to the ceiling.
Kitten.
Kittenkittenkitten.
He bit it out like it was a curse, but he said it. It’s been on a constant loop since it left his lips. There has been a steady, aching hope filling me up from the hole in my chest out since he slammed the door.
Stupid and naive? Probably.
I can’t bring myself to stop it, though. A low, low thrum of anxious excitement is there, too, flowing from my heart to my limbs and sending out a sense of life I haven’t felt in years.
The smile on my face feels real, even if small. A secret smile between me and all the delusions I have ever harbored for Bowen. I may never be what I want to be to him, but I will take kitten. Maybe one day said in the way he used to say it. With adoring exasperation most days, but still.
Bowen is scared, I think. I need to prove to him that I’m not going anywhere. Fight for him like I decided to a few days ago. And now that I know he doesn’t want me to leave?
The smile on my face grows, and I slowly run my hands over the sheets next to me. That’s how he finds me.
Of course it is.
He stands, leaning against the door frame. Looking at me, lying by the end of his bed with a weirdo smile on my face.
“What are you doing?” He looks like he barely slept. I want to ask him where he was, but I’m willing to bet he was with Ian.
“Your bed is softer than the guest bed.” I say casually, flopping back down on my back. “You look like shit, by the way.”
