The world didn’t stop. The rain kept hitting the window. My throbbing hand kept aching. The neighbor’s TV blared a laugh track through the wall. But inside me, everything went terribly, perfectly still. The three words I’d craved, starved for, built altars to in my heart… they landed like a death sentence too late to save anything.
“What a tragedy,” I choked out, my voice wrecked beyond recognition.
“I do.” She took a hesitant step forward, then froze when she saw the violent rejection in my eyes. “I love you. I think I loved you before I even knew what to call it. And I was so fucking terrified that you would become the thing that could finally destroy me… that I destroyed you first. To save myself.”
A harsh, humorless bark of laughter escaped me. It sounded like something breaking. “That,” I said, “is the most pathetic, self-serving, fucked-up love story I have ever heard in my life.”
“I know.” She didn’t deny it. The admission was its own kind of pain.
“Do you?” My voice climbed, laced with a fury that was really just grief in a sharper costume. “Because I am still in love with you, Aura. Right now. Standing here, hating you, wanting to shake you until your teeth rattle, I am so fucking in love with you it feels like a sickness. It’s not pure. It’s not sweet. It’s twisted and dark and it hurts. It hurts because I’m so angry I can’t see straight, and the only thing I want is for you to be closer.”
She cried then, in earnest. Silent, shoulder-shaking tears that streamed down her face, dripping onto the black fabric clutched in her hands. She made no move to wipe them away.
“Look at what we’ve done,” I said, the fight draining out of me, leaving only a hollow exhaustion. “Our friends? Bliss is breaking herself trying to love you and she doesn’t know the truth of us and what it cost me to love you. Charm is falling apart because she sees you hurting and can’t fix it. Cade is holding Bliss together while she watches everyone she loves bleed in different directions. The guys watch me like I’m a live grenade with the pin pulled. My own mother looked at me and told me not to let this turn me into something cruel. She was afraid for me, but also of what I might become. And I am trying, Aura. I am trying so fucking hard not to become the monster that would prove every one of your fears right.”
“I never wanted you to be a monster,” she whispered.
“You never wanted to face what you were creating,” I corrected, my voice flat. “That’s different.”
She flinched, her mouth closing. The hit landed, and I felt the sick satisfaction of it, followed immediately by a wave of self-loathing so potent it made me dizzy.
“You want forgiveness?” I asked, the question a bare, exposed nerve.
She nodded, a tiny, shattered movement.
“I don’t have it.” My hands were trembling violently. I shoved the good one deep into the pocket of my jeans to hide it while the injured one throbbed openly at my side, wrapped and ruined and still stained pink through the gauze. “I have love. A love that feels like a curse. I have anger that could fuel a city. I have a year’s worth of memories where I was happy before those same memories were turned on me, where I felt like a clown for wanting to hold your hand in public. I have the image of your face tonight—the shock, the betrayal—when you realized I could hurt you too, and I hate myself for being the one to put it there. I am a museum of every fucked-up thing we did to each other. But forgiveness?” I met her gaze, let her see the barren truth in mine. “That exhibit is empty.”
She pressed a hand flat over her heart, as if I’d physically struck her there. Her breath came in short, sharp hitches.
“What do we do?” The question was a ghost of a sound, the plea of a soul facing its own execution.
I looked at her. At the beautiful, ruined girl in her crumpled Sin Bin uniform, standing in the wreckage of an intimacy that had been both our sanctuary and our prison. I wanted, more than anything, to have an answer. A path forward. A thread of hope.
There was none.
There was only the desolate landscape of the aftermath.
“You get dressed,” I said, my voice scraped down to its bedrock. “And you go.”
She inhaled sharply, a sound of pure, unmitigated pain, as if I’d driven the knife in deeper and given it a twist.
I turned my back. I couldn’t watch her follow this final command. Not after everything. Not after understanding the profound, terrible significance of her obedience in the spaces between us. I fixed my eyes on the rivulets of rain distorting the city lights outside, and I let the world blur into meaningless streaks of color.
Behind me, the sounds were a slow torture. The soft rustle of fabric as she fixed her bra and pulled the Sin Bin shirt back over her head. The faint tug of the shorts being straightened over her hips. The shaky, controlled rhythm of her breathing as she tried and failed to steady herself. The slight drag of ruined panties being shoved into her bag instead of pulled back on. Each sound was a nail in the coffin of us.
When she spoke, her voice was small, defeated. It was a voice I’d never heard from her—Aura Clarke, made miniature by grief. “Did I ruin every part of us?”
My jaw clenched so tightly a muscle ticked in my cheek. The truth was a shard of glass on my tongue, cutting me as I prepared to spit it out.
“No,” I said, the word leaving me in a defeated exhale. “You ruined the part of me that believed love was enough.”
A sharp, wounded gasp. A sound of utter desolation. It was the sound of a door closing forever.
Then footsteps. Slow, hesitant, then quicker, more desperate. The creak of a floorboard near the door. The metallic scrape of the knob turning. A pause—one endless, heart-stopping moment where I imagined her looking back, her hand on the door, her eyes finding my rigid back.
She didn’t.
The door opened. A sliver of sickly yellow hallway light invaded the dim room, painting a guilty stripe across the floorboards. The sounds of the building—a distant shout, a TV, the hum of old pipes—rushed in, violating our private apocalypse.
