Prologue
“Walk with me.”
His voice is too calm, the kind of calm that means the decision has already been made. It terrifies me more than the shouting ever could. I look at him and finally see what I’ve been pretending not to: the emptiness hollowed out behind his eyes, the way his hand hangs too carefully at his side, the outline of the gun he thinks I haven’t noticed.
We walk toward the beach in silence. The waves roll in, steady and indifferent, while he talks about trying. About loving me. About how I left.
His words blur into the wind. I don’t hear him. I can’t. My friends are safe. And so is the man I love. They’ll look after him, and I cling to that one truth like it’s the last thing keeping me upright.
He steps closer, and the question that shatters what’s left of me slips from his lips, quiet and broken.
“What am I supposed to do with a world where you’re not mine?”
We stop, and I hear his voice behind me.
“Kneel.”
The word isn’t loud. It doesn’t need to be, but it lands like a verdict.
I drop to the sand. It’s cold, damp, clinging to my skin like the world is already trying to bury me. I close my eyes and thinkof him, the man I’ve fallen in love with. His smile. His dimple. The way he made me feel like I mattered, like I was worthy of something more than the chaos I was born into.
He is my Sunshine and my home.
The sand slips through my fingers, each grain a countdown I can’t stop. I hold onto one impossible hope, that I’ll see him again. Because I’m not ready to leave him. Not yet.
“I love you.”
I whisper it into the darkness, into the wind, into whatever comes next.
The gunshot splits the night.
A scream tears through the air,
And then.
Nothing.
1
CJ
Jesus.
The sun has no business being this bright.
It doesn’t just shine; it cuts, slicing through the gap in the curtains like a blade and driving straight into the softest part of my skull. The hangover already pounding behind my eyes surges, vicious and unforgiving.
I roll away from the window, dragging a jagged groan out of my chest. Nausea hits first. Acidic and hot.
Then comes the smell. Stale whiskey and regret.
I hit the whiskey hard last night, harder than I should’ve, trying to outrun the memories, drown them, silence them. It didn’t work. It never does.
The bottle lay empty on the floor beside my bed, as a silent witness. It’s a monument to my failure.
It didn’t work. It never fucking works.
Not when it came to him.
