I couldn’t answer. I wanted to. I needed to. I needed to paint a smile on my face, needed to inform him of this wonderful adventure that I was going on by choice. Not by force.
“You’re seriously fucking leaving?” he spat the words at me when silence had stretched on for too long between us.
I nodded once, still unable to say anything when everything I needed to say was clogging up my throat, my lungs.
More silence as his eyes turned cruel, hard and angry. It was familiar, since that was the way he’d stared at me since I’d announced I was marrying another man.
It wasn’t present on my wedding day, of course.
No, it disappeared that day to show the vulnerability underneath.
But then I’d stamped on that, shredded it like I shredded my own heart and that horrible empty gaze was now permanent.
Because. Of. Me.
“Jesus,” he muttered, shaking his head violently. Everything about him was violent now. It didn’t used to be. Not on a night that turned into a weekend that seemed like a thousand years ago. The night that started it all.
He had a little violence in him then. Staining his skin. In a way that might just wash off, if things changed. If he found peace instead of the war he’d committed to.
But now it wasn’t staining his skin. It was etched into his very soul. And I was adding to it. Because it seemed like every time we were in front of each other, there was another layer to his violence. Until it came with every movement, every glance, every breath.
And it was at its peak right now.
“You expect me to ask you to stay? To not let you leave?” he hissed. “To fuckin’ demand you to stop running from this shit because it’s evident whatever it is between us isn’t gonna let us go, despite how fuckin’ much I want it to?”
His words and the true frustration behind them hit me like bullets. It was a miracle I was still upright. Since I was expending all my energy just doing that, I didn’t have anything left inside me to speak.
“Is that what this is?” He nodded to the pack. “You runnin’ ‘cause you want me to chase you? Because I’m not gonna do that.”
He stepped out of the doorway, leaving it open to me.
“So if you leave, that’s it. That’s us. Finally fuckin’ over. Because I won’t chase you. I fuckin’ can’t. One of us has to stop this shit. And I gotta do it for my sanity. I won’t ask you to stay either. Because you do what you want, regardless of what I say. Of what I fuckin’ beg. We both know that. And I’m still fuckin’ standing here. It’s the last time I will be. So what are you gonna do, Little Girl?”
Something left his eyes when he uttered the last two words. Something that seeped into me. Tugged at all those frayed and torn threads in my soul. Teased me with a lie that maybe this could be fixed. Maybe like the two previous residents of this apartment, I might get an ever after.
But that wasn’t my story.
I kept my lips pursed, somehow my eyes stayed dry and I walked out the door. I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. Every single inch of my willpower, my strength was going to putting one foot in front of the other, taking me away from the one man I’d truly loved with all of me.
The one man who’d broken me.
And then I’d broken him right back.
I blinked at the tears streaming down my cheeks. The tears I’d fought in this very doorway a year ago. Tears I’d battled with for every second after.
And they came with a force that literally brought me to my knees.
They beckoned me into the abyss.
Chapter Seven
“Dude, are you dead?”
I jerked at the words because they were yelled at me. Like right in my ear.
I blinked rapidly, sitting up just as rapidly, the world spinning with a worrying speed and I panicked with a few moments of utter confusion of where the heck I was.
But then my seriously foggy brain caught up, and it caught up faster than most people since I was familiar with waking up in strange places. I was usually more panicked when I woke up in the same place for too long. The scream was familiar, as was the grinning face in front of me, and the apartment she was in.
My apartment.
The one I’d arrived in...however long ago.
The one I’d sobbed into unconsciousness on the floor of.
At some point, I’d obviously moved myself to the sofa, which was where I was now. I didn’t remember this. But that wasn’t strange. I was a sleepwalker—when I did sleep, that was. I had woken in all sorts of places I hadn’t gone to sleep in. Hallways, gardens, once, somehow, my own car.
But this was likely more to do with being jetlagged and my zombie brain realizing it was uncomfortable to sleep on hardwood floors. I’d slept on much worse in my travels. I was a heavy sleeper when my brain let myself sleep. Could sleep through anything. And obviously, I had been sleeping through Rosie entering the apartment—which she would’ve done loudly because she’s Rosie—and trying to wake me up in a slightly quieter manner than this.
I blinked grit from my eyes. It felt vaguely like I’d been hit by some heavy-duty vehicle. The last eleven months packaged into that vehicle.
No, the last six years packaged into it.
“Thank god, I didn’t have to do mouth to mouth, it’d ruin my lipstick,” Rosie said, this time at a more respectable decibel.
“How did you know I was home?” I croaked at her, my throat scratchy and crying out for any kind of hydration. My muscles ached. My stomach was cramping with the emptiness of it. My bladder was full.
I’d obviously been asleep for a long while.
Rosie tilted her head, obviously taking note of what a freaking mess I was. Of course, she was glossy and beautiful, wearing a bright pink knit dress, white ankle boots and her hair in messy curls around her face.
“Um, I have contacts at the border,” she said as if I should’ve known this. I actually should’ve. Rosie had ‘contacts’ everywhere. “I had you under a red flag in like twenty-eight countries, just to be safe,” she continued. “Color me disappointed that I didn’t have to come and rescue you from some sort of cult again.”
I frowned. “It wasn’t a cult. It was a collective,” I argued, speaking of my first residence in L.A.
“Anything that starts with C is a euphemism for cult, Pol,” she said. “But whatever, I’ve missed you. And I would communicate this with a hug but you kind of...reek.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’m guessing you haven’t showered since some strange hostel in Belgrade?”
I blinked again. “How did you—”
“I’m me,” she interrupted, again, as if I should know. Again, I should’ve. I’d known Rosie almost my entire life, and though she didn’t share the same blood as Lucy and I, she was our sister. “Now, you get up, get showered and less scary and I’ll make you food.”
I raised my brow at her. “You’ll make food?”
She sighed. “Fine, I’ll order food. This is L.A., no one makes food.” She narrowed her eyes. “And then I want to know everything.”
My stomach dropped.
“Don’t worry, not the stuff that made you leave in the first place,” she said softly. “We’ll get to that. But I’ll hear about the rest until you’re ready.”