I fall asleep like that—pinned under his weight, still full of him. The hollow ache behind my ribs never really leaves. It just gets drowned out for these last few hours by the heat of his body, the steady thump of his heart against my back, and the brutal knowledge that we’re not done yet.
Not until the sun forces us apart.
The bed is empty.
I wake to cold sheets. My hand slides across them out of habit and finds nothing. George is already long gone.
I lie there for a long time, staring at the ceiling, letting the truth sink in. I knew it was coming. Doesn’t make the empty space beside me hurt any fucking less.
Eventually, I drag myself out of bed and walk into the lounge, still naked. Every step hurts. My body is sore in all the places he took too hard, too deep last night. The marks he left throb under my skin like bruises I’m not ready to watch fade.
I welcome the pain. It’s the only part of him I get to keep.
In the kitchen, the cardboard box I packed for him days ago is gone. His toothbrush, spare razor, the shirts I washed and folded, even the worn work gloves he always left by my sink. All of it gone. In its place sits a single key.
My apartment key.
I close my eyes, standing frozen in the empty kitchen, and let the tears fall. The ache in my chest feels carved in bone now—brutal, permanent, and full of every stolen moment we pretended would never have to end.
41
Lance
On my last shift, the San Diego Medical Center Emergency Department throws me a send-off that is, by any reasonable standard, excessive.
Nate orders a cake from the place on Fletcher Parkway that does custom frosting, and someone’s writtenDon’t die in Seattleacross it in blue icing. Dr. Fernandez gives a short speech that’s deeply kind, only slightly undermined by the fact she’s fighting tears by the end of it.
People from other shifts show up too, even ones not meant to be on, which tells me Nate has made this a bigger deal than he’s pretending.
After shift, I tell Charlie about George.
She doesn’t look at me for a full minute. She holds the silence long enough for it to sting. I’m the traitor who stole her man after all. After a while, she lets it go, because it’s my last day and she’s not going to hold it against me.
She doesn’t interrupt. Somewhere in the middle, she figures out it isn’t just another story, that it actually hurt me, and it’s part of why I’m leaving.
She pulls me into a hug like that settles something. Says I’m an idiot for it, and then—because it’s Charlie—calls George one too, and says we don’t like him anymore.
I change out of my navy-blue SDMC scrubs for the last time.
Marcus’s three-bedroom apartment sits on the fourteenth floor of a sleek building on Capitol Hill, with wall-to-wall windows overlooking the Sound. The place looks like it was staged for a lifestyle magazine spread. Everything is perfectly placed, spotless.
The art is actually decent. The kitchen is painfully immaculate. And the cream linen couch? Pristine, perfectly angled toward the TV. Clearly never had a grown man pass out on it with a warm beer sweating rings onto the coffee table.
That couch offends me on a spiritual level.
I drop my bag in the guest room. Nice view, sure. Fresh towels folded like origami, blank walls, zero personality. It looks less like a bedroom and more like a high-end furniture catalog had a baby with a hostage negotiation room. And this is where I’ll be sleeping.
I stand there for a minute, taking it all in. It feels like stepping back into a life that used to be mine. Except now we don’t fit each other anymore.
I’m getting my own place soon.
The kid in bed four has been negotiating his way out of a blood draw for the past twenty minutes. He’s seven, with wide eyes and a stubborn tilt to his chin that tells me he’s done this dance beforeand got emotionally scarred for life. His mother sits beside him looking exhausted but patient.
Eastside Family Urgent Care doesn’t look like much from the outside. Strip-mall unit wedged between a dry cleaner and a sandwich shop, blue lettering on glass doors, a waiting room with eight chairs and a fish tank nobody ever remembers to clean.
Inside, it’s four exam rooms, curtains instead of partitions, a single nurses’ station where Renee runs the front desk, answers phones, restocks supplies, and somehow keeps everything moving like she’s got extra hours nobody else was issued.
It’s a five-minute walk from Hearthside. That’s why I took it. Meant to be temporary. A handful of shifts here and there.
