“Maybe I should,” I whisper as his voice from my phone reverberates in the air.
“Don’t do that.” His voice is brittle. “Live for me, yeah?”
“But you didn’t live for me! I begged you! I fucking begged you to live for me, but you chose to let your demons take you instead of talking to me about them. You promised to stay! You promised me!”
I curse myself when I look to my side, and all I see is air.
Fuck.
Fuck.
I can’t even speak to his ghost now. What if he completely disappears on me, then what?
My hand shakes around the phone as I listen to his voice, my nose tingling and my lips numb. I pull up his Instagram and scroll through his pictures.
There are hundreds of them—selfies, pictures from games, photos with Miley, Jude, and Kane.
Some with Hayes, too.
But I scroll to a specific photo—one he posted the night I fucked him for the first time. It’s a black-and-white slightly blurry selfie, showing only half of his face as he stands in the rain, his hair all but covering his eyes.
The caption says—Je veux pas partir.
I translated it, and it meansI don’t want to go.
Even when he was running away, he wasn’t really. Deep down, he wanted to stay with me, he just didn’t know how.
“Pres…” I mumble in the silence, stroking my finger against the screen. “If you wanted to stay, why didn’t you? Did it hurt that much to be with me? Was the pain so unbearable, you couldn’t talk to me? Vent to me? Bare yourself to me? If…if I’d held on to you tighter, would you have fought for me? For us?”
My voice chokes as a droplet falls on the screen, distorting his face, making my vision blurry. “If you planned to leave, why did you change my life so drastically that I can’t recognize it anymore? How am I supposed to move on now? I can’t seem to do that. Everything I had passion for is gone. I don’t want hockey or revenge. I don’t want anything. Is this how you felt in those last moments? Like you didn’t want anything anymore?”
My jaw shakes as another droplet falls on the screen. “Not even me, baby?”
He doesn’t say anything, not even his ghost is able to reply. Only his voice from the voicemail echoes in the air.
“You’ve reached emotional terrorist and part-time hockey legend, Preston Armstrong…”
Again.
“You’ve reached emotional terrorist and part-time hockey legend, Preston Armstrong…”
Again.
“You’ve reached emotional terrorist and part-time hockey legend, Preston Armstrong…”
A car rolls to a halt beside me. I wipe the moisture from my eyes with the back of my hand, but I don’t pay the newcomer any attention as the door opens, and, instead, keep listening to the voicemail message.
It isn’t until a man in a sharp black three-piece suit walks toward me that I straighten, gripping the phone tighter.
He throws a glance at it, listening to Preston’s voice in the darkness.
Lawrence.
I hang up, my fist clenched. Maybe I should kill him, make him join his mother and give Preston some company.
But then again, he looks like an older version of Preston, and I don’t think I’d ever have the heart to hurt someone who basically has his face.
“Hello, Marcus,” he says in a monotone voice, and I can’t help recalling how often Preston called him a robot.
