Chapter 10
It’s the stillness that gets me.
Not the noise. Not the pain. Not even the memories.
It’s the quiet that creeps in when everything else fades . When the drinks stop flowing, when the music dies, when Knox leaves me in front of my apartment and doesn’t ask to come up.
It’s in that space where I unravel. The calm. The kindness. The truth.
They all feel foreign. Too soft. Too generous. Like my skin doesn’t know what to do with anything that doesn’t cut. The doesn’t numb
I don’t sleep. I sit on the floor in the dark, back against the couch, staring at nothing. My body aches. My chest is tight. My mouth is dry, but I don’t want water. I want to feel numb. I want something to erase the taste of hope.
Because hope is a trap.
I close my eyes and lean my head back. I see Sebastian. I see him the night he proposed. On one knee. Hands shaking. Voice breaking. I thought it was love. Now I know it was possession. It was the idea of me and nothing more.Control in disguise. He wanted me tamed.
Contained.
Owned.
Unavailable to the one my eyes drifted to first.
Knox doesn’t want anything from me. And that’s what scares me the most. Because if he’s not trying to win me, then why do I still want to run?
The next morning, I wake to my phone buzzing.
Knox: You up?
I stare at it for a long time before replying.
Lana: Barely.
Knox: Coffee?
I hesitate.
Lana: Why?
His response comes fast:
Knox: Because you need a reason not to disappear today.
I don’t cry. But I want to.
I throw on jeans and a hoodie and meet him downstairs twenty minutes later. He’s parked across the street, leaned against his car with two cups in his hands. One black coffee. The other’s got my name on the lid, misspelled. Two Ns instead of one.
I take it without a word and sip. Too sweet. Just how I like it. We walk in silence for a while, down streets I never noticed in daylight before. The city feels different like this, quiet, ordinary, honest.
“Do you ever stop moving?” I ask.
He glances at me. “I try not to.”
“Why?”
“Stillness hurts.”
I stop walking. “Exactly,” I whisper.
He looks at me, eyes steady. “That’s why you live like you’re running from a fire.”
I swallow hard. “Aren’t we all?”
“Some people run away from the flames. You run into them.”
I shrug. “At least they’re warm.”
We reach a bench in a small park, and I sit, exhausted from a fifteen-minute walk. Knox doesn’t sit. He stands beside me, watching a kid in a red hoodie chase pigeons near a fountain.
“He doesn’t know anything yet,” I say. “About how it feels to lose yourself.”
Knox hums. “He will.”
“That’s depressing. He’s just a kid.”
“It’s honest and weren’t all just kids at one point and time?”
I sip my coffee and close my eyes. “I guess but it’s sad to think that way.” The caffeine sharpens the edges of my thoughts, but it can’t clean them. After a while, I say, “I used to want things that I thought were everything to life. A lot of things. Marriage. Kids. A house with a backyard.”
“They are part of it and you still could. What changed? I’m not talking about what happened with…him.”
“Life. How it’s all a facade.”
“Be more specific.”
I sigh. “I fell in love with someone who only loved me when I was free to have whoever I wanted. He lied. It was never love but he made me believe it was. And then I got addicted to the silence that came after the screaming. I broke.”
Knox is quiet for a long time. Then he says, “You’re stronger than you think.”
I open my eyes and look at him. “You don’t know this version of me.”
“I’m learning.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve been where you are.”
That shuts me up. I stare at him, really stare. There’s pain behind his calm. I see it now. The kind that doesn’t announce itself but bleeds into everything.
“What happened to you?” I ask.
He meets my eyes. “I lost someone I couldn’t save. Someone I wanted more than anything.”
I want to ask him who it is. Who he couldn’t save but not today. We sit in silence after that. Different silences than I’ve known. Not heavy. Not hostile.
Just... quiet.
Back at the bar that night, everything feels louder than usual. The lights too bright. The music too sharp. Even the ice clinks louder in the glasses I’m pouring.
Jazz comes in late, lipstick smeared, eyes puffy. “You good?” I ask.
She nods too quickly. I say nothing, but I hand her a soda instead of vodka. She takes it and walks off. The pain is contagious in this place. We pass it around like cigarettes.
By midnight, my hands start to shake again. The headache comes back. The craving for a drink. A line of coke.
I find myself thinking about the stash I threw away. I wonder if it’s still in the dumpster. I wonder how low I’d have to be to go digging for it.
Knox isn’t here tonight and I hate how much I notice. It’s like he’s my line of reason.
By 2 a.m., I’m standing in the alley behind the Velvet Room, breathing hard. The air smells like rot and piss.
I close my eyes and lean against the wall. Then I hear footsteps. I tense.
A figure rounds the corner and I sign in relief. Knox. He says nothing. Just holds out a bottle of water and a protein bar. I take them.
“Why do you keep showing up?” I ask, voice cracking.
“Because you don’t ask for help.”
“I don’t want help.”
He chuckles. “Liar.”
I laugh bitterly. “That obvious?”
He shrugs. “Only to someone who’s needed it before.”
I sit on a crate. My knees shake. “I almost went looking for it,” I say.
“The stash?” He says like he knows where I keep it.
I nod. “I didn’t.”
He nods too. “That matters.”
“I hate that this is hard.”
“Everything worth doing is.”
I swallow. “I don’t think I’m strong enough.”
He leans on the crate. His leg inches from mine. “I think you’re wrong.”
We sit there in silence. He doesn’t touch me. Doesn’t pressure me.
Just sits.
That’s what I need. Someone who doesn’t expect me to be okay. Someone who’s willing to sit in the dark with me until I’m ready to face the noise.
“I got to go back inside.”
He sighs. “I have to out of town. I’ll be back in the morning.”
I nod.
“Don’t do anything you’ll regret later.”
That’s easy for him to say. He’s got everything figured out. He finished school, runs his father’s company and more money than he knows what to do with.
It’s only a matter of time until he gets bored and goes back to his normal successful life.