Chapter 19
Chapter nineteen
Zac
Past
Idon’t come here often.
Not because I don’t want to—but because when I do, it destroys me.
Tonight, the air is crisp, laced with the damp bite of turned soil and eucalyptus from nearby gum trees. Wet leaves stick to my boots, and my breath fogs out in puffs.
Sydney’s winters rarely demand much. No snow, no black ice, only the illusion of cold. But now, the polar blast cuts through my coat and bites at my skin. I blow into my hands, rub them together, anything to feel warmth. Anything but this.
“Hey,” I say softly. “It’s late. I know. Couldn’t sleep.”
The words fall flat against the silence.
Somewhere in the distance, a bat chirps.
Something rustles in the grass. But all I can focus on is the way the cold settles deep in my bones.
This place doesn’t just hurt—it hollows me out.
From the moment I turned the car onto the gravel drive, I felt it in my chest. A phantom pressure.
My body knows what’s coming before my mind lets it in.
The ache isn’t metaphorical. It’s cellular.
My chest constricts. My throat burns. My legs get heavy, dragging me down before I even reach where I’m going.
Every step toward her feels like I’m walking barefoot on broken glass. And yet, I come back. I always do. Even when I swear I can’t anymore. Even when the guilt claws at my insides, whispering that I don’t deserve to speak her name.
I’ve been dreading this visit for months. Dreading what I’d have to say and what I might feel. Dreading the fact that I don’t even know if I’ll feel anything at all—and how that scares me more than the pain ever could.
Because this isn’t just a conversation. This is a confession. A reckoning. And deep down, I know that once I start—once I say the thing I’ve buried inside me—I can’t take it back. I can’t un-feel it. I can’t un-know what it means.
“I’m sorry,” I apologize softly, shaking my head. “I’ve got no one to blame but myself. I put us here. No one else.”
Casey doesn’t answer.
I’ve been picking up double shifts just to think straight. Twenty-four-hour madness in the ER is easier to manage than twenty-four minutes alone in my own damn head. At least at the hospital, I know what needs fixing. At least in a trauma room, there’s no risk of calling a patient the wrong name.
Because that’s the fear now.
That I’ll slip. That I’ll call Gigi Casey, or worse—call Casey Gigi.
They look nothing alike—different hair, different laugh—but somehow, my mind blurs the lines anyway.
One day I’ll forget which set of eyes I’m drowning in, whose voice is echoing in my ears, whose hair I’m threading between my fingers in the dark.
And God help me… I don’t want to forget either.
They deserve better.
I drop my gaze, the wind whistling through bare branches overhead. “I’ve been trying to keep it together—for you. For me. For the idea of us. But I can’t keep splitting myself in half like this, pretending.”
Eden was never supposed to be anything but a pressure release. The guys have been members for years, always trying to drag me along. I resisted—until two years ago, when I finally gave in. Because I had nothing left in the tank.
It wasn’t only about sex. It was a place where I didn’t have to feel for a while. To not carry every loss like a second spine. Rules, control, and the illusion of calm.
Eden gave me that. And it worked—for a while.
I could have my needs met quickly and quietly with no fuss. Without putting in the effort to get to know someone. As fucked up as it sounds now, I didn’t care who they were. Not their names, their stories, or their lives. They were background noise.
There was no risk of connection, the kind I had with Casey. She was my heart, my home. Until I picked the wrong goddess.
And suddenly, everything that had been clean got messy. Everything that was numb came roaring back.
Because she wasn’t background noise.
She was color. Loud, blinding color in a world I’d let fade to grayscale.
And after that night, nothing—not even Eden—felt the same again.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” I add quietly. “With her.”
The wind picks up around us, and I squint against the cold air burning my eyes, making them water.
“I can’t lie to you anymore. I tried to keep it surface-level. I did. But there’s something about her, Case. She’s…”
My hands push into my coat pockets as I angle my body away from her, my eyes fixed on nothing.
No matter how hard I try to trace it back—what made Gigi different, what made her stick—I come up blank. She’s kind and beautiful. Funny in a dry, sarcastic way that always makes me laugh. But a lot of people are those things. It’s not just that.
Maybe it was fate. Or my soul catching the echo of its missing piece.
I press the heel of my hands into my eyes and try to make sense of the confusion swirling around my brain.
I don’t even know her real name. Where she grew up, what she wanted to be as a kid, who broke her heart first. But none of that stops me from falling.
Those details don’t even matter. Strip away the labels, the past, the formalities—what’s left is the core. And her core… it’s good. Soft but fierce. I feel it in my gut every time I look at her.
And I want to know her. Not just touch her. I want to be near her, protect her, make her laugh when the world is shit. I want to give her everything.
Even our kink—this whole Zaddy thing—is new to me. Casey and I tried it once. It felt staged. Like we were both playing roles we didn’t audition for. But with Gigi, it’s like something I forgot I already knew how to do. It was always there, waiting. For her.
It’s not only about dominance, but about care and instinct too. I want to guide her and watch her thrive. I want her safe. Held. Unshakable.
It’s fucked up how little I know about her. And how sure I am that she’s already part of me.
“I feel like I’m betraying you.”
Pausing, the shame creeps up my spine. Because saying it aloud makes it real.
“I’m scared,” I admit. “Of letting go. Of forgetting the sound of your voice. Of loving someone else. Of not loving you enough if I do.”
Silence answers me again.
“I miss you,” I tell her. “Every fucking day.”
The earth is soft here, sunken slightly from time and weight. Moss growing into the lettering etched into stone.
“I still hear your voice, you know,” I whisper. “When I’m tired. When I’m alone at night.”
My head shakes in disbelief.
Come away with me, she’d asked the night before she died. That’s what I hear, day after day. For so long I wished that I had. Until Gigi.
“I haven’t stopped loving you. That hasn’t changed. And it never will.”
I exhale slowly.
“But you don’t own my whole heart anymore.”
The words are a betrayal, even as I whisper them. I shake my head again, ashamed—not of the truth, but of how it happened. I let my guard down and Gigi broke through. Just a sliver. Enough to slip through the crack. And now that she’s in, she’s not leaving.
“I didn’t plan this.”
I wasn’t looking. Wasn’t ready. But the universe shoved her into my life anyway, and I’ve been spiraling ever since.
“But it’s happened. And I can’t undo it.”
Kneeling down, the cold seeps through the knees of my pants. I adjust the bouquet—pink gardenias, her favorite—until they sit just right in the vase. Casey hated anything crooked.
The wind bites at my skin and I pull my coat tighter around me. “I hope… someday, you’ll understand. And forgive me.”
I used to think you could only love one person at a time. That for someone new to take root, the old love had to wither, or at least make space. But I know now that’s bullshit. There’s room for both.
What I feel for Gigi doesn’t diminish what I have with Casey. It’s different, but it’s just as real. Just as powerful. Just as consuming.
Time doesn’t matter much when it comes to the heart.
“I love you, Casey.”
I brush away the wet leaves clinging to the granite.
The headstone is simple. Her name. Her short years. And one final line we stole from our vows.
LOVE FIERCELY. LOVE WELL.
I kiss two fingers and press them to her photo—smiling, radiant, forever thirty-nine.
Until we see each other again.
“Always will,” I murmur.
And for a moment, I swear the wind stills around me.