Chapter 17
ELLIOT
Ihadn’t meant to listen. I only meant to understand.
I’d been halfway down the stairs before I realized I was moving, my body pulled by something I couldn’t name.
A pressure in my chest that felt like it needed air.
The wood was cold under my bare feet. I held the railing like it might keep me upright if my knees decided to stop working.
Anthony’s voice floated up from the kitchen. I stayed where I was, my stomach twisted in knots as I strained to hear whoever was on the other line. But Anthony had been careful when he’d taken calls and always left the space we’d shared.
On silent feet I crept into the kitchen and crouched by the window so I could hear more clearly. Whoever he was talking to was loud. So loud I could catch parts of their conversation.
“…that’s not love. That’s obsession.”
The word hit me before I knew it was coming. Obsession. It landed in my body like something hard and final — like a door being slammed inside me.
My stomach lurched. Heat rushed up my throat. My fingers curled into the banister without me telling them to.
“…you need to get out before you ruin him.”
Ruin. The room tilted. I swallowed, but my mouth stayed dry. My pulse started hammering so hard I could feel it in my ears.
“I didn’t ruin him,” Anthony said.
My breath caught on that word. Didn’t. Past tense.
“I just couldn’t fix him.”
Not love. Not care. Just obsession. Just ruin. I was just too much. Too broken for him.
I tried to rearrange the words into something softer. Something survivable. He didn’t mean it like that. He was tired. He was scared.
But every version I offered myself fell apart the moment I touched it. The words stayed exactly like what they were—heavy, blunt. Final. They didn’t leave room for love. They didn’t leave room for me. They were already closing the door while I was still standing in the frame.
I backed up slowly, every step deliberate so the stairs wouldn’t creak. My heart was pounding so loudly I was sure he could hear it from the kitchen. When I reached my room, I pushed the door open without sound and slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor.
My hands were shaking. I pressed my palms flat to the carpet to ground myself. The fibers scratched against my skin—rough, real—and I focused on that because everything else felt like it was slipping.
My throat kept trying to close like it had forgotten how swallowing worked.
I kept pulling air in too fast and then having nowhere to put it.
My stomach rolled like I was about to be sick, but nothing came up—just acid and heat and a sickening hollow where something essential had been.
My body was panicking. My mind was going quiet.
That mismatch scared me more than either one alone
My chest hurt in a way I couldn’t reach. The ache was too big. Too shapeless. I needed it smaller. I needed it somewhere I could touch.
I went to the closet on my knees. A part of me stood up and took over.
The part that knows exactly how to make this stop.
It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t cruel. It was calm and efficient and almost kind.
I’ve got this, it seemed to say. You don’t have to feel this part.
Pulled out the shoebox with hands that finally stopped shaking when they touched it.
That scared me more than the shaking had.
The calm. The way my breath slowed. The way my body leaned into it like it had been waiting. How I didn’t think about anything while I did it.
Not Anthony.
Not obsession.
Not ruin.
Just the moment when the inside of me stopped screaming. Just the place where the ache finally had a shape. I craved it like an addict needed a hit. I flipped the penknife in my hand, flicked it open and cleaned it with an antiseptic wipe. I’d used it far too much recently not to be careful.
A deep breath filled my lungs as I shoved my sleeve back exposing my ravaged skin. The metal blade glinted in the fading light. Like it offered some form of divine intervention, not that I believed in anything like that.
When the blade cut into my skin everything went silent.
The pain and tension drained out of my body as blood welled on my skin.
I cut deep enough for it to drip on the floor.
But I didn’t feel it, not like you’d expect; it was like I was locked in a sensory deprivation room.
It was heaven after burning alive in hell.
After, I sat there with my forehead against my knees, breathing slow and shallow, letting the quiet seep back in.
The quiet wasn’t peace. It was vacancy. It was like someone had turned all the lights off inside me and left me sitting in the dark with myself.
I felt smaller. Dirtier. Further away from whatever I’d been trying to save.
The relief didn’t feel like relief. It felt like giving something up.
That’s when I heard him again. His voice—muffled through the floor. I’d forgotten I’d left my door open. “I’ll be back at work tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. The word detonated inside me. Because tomorrow meant normal. Tomorrow meant distance. Tomorrow meant he was already moving on.
Tomorrow wasn’t just a word. It was a whole world where I didn’t fit. It was him waking up without me in his arms. It was coffee without my mug next to his. It was his voice turning professional, careful, distant. Tomorrow was where he went when he didn’t need me anymore.
And he was already there.
Already stepping away. My breath left my body in a rush. My hands started shaking again, harder this time.
Work meant leaving. Leaving meant disappearing. The room felt too small. The house felt like it was closing around me.
I shoved the box back into the closet, grabbed the blade without thinking, and stood up too fast. My head swam. I didn’t care. There was nothing left to care about.
Something in me gave up right then. Not cracked. Not bent. I just… let go. Like a hand that had been gripping a ledge for too long finally opening because the pain of holding on had become worse than the fall.
My chest felt heavy. Not tight—heavy. Like gravity had doubled inside my ribs. Like breathing was suddenly optional.
I wasn’t crying because crying still wanted something. I wasn’t panicked because panic still believed in danger. I felt finished. Like the story had ended and my body just hadn’t caught up yet.
That was the scariest part.
The backdoor clicked shut, and I stumbled across my room managing to close mine, just before he walked past it.
I felt him pause as much as I heard his step stop.
I felt the pain in his shuddering breaths.
I imagined him standing there, eyes red-rimmed, face tear-stained like mine was.
Hand raised ready to knock, but instead he pulled away.
Taking the moral high ground because that was what society told him to do.
I collapsed on my bed, laying down where he’d been.
My face pressed into the place his shoulder had warmed the sheets.
The smell of him was still there—soap and skin and something darker that belonged only to us.
My mouth still remembered him. My body still answered to him.
It felt obscene and sacred at the same time, like touching a relic after the religion has died.
When I heard him answer another call, I knew I could escape while he was preoccupied. I moved without urgency. Without drama. Without the frantic edge that people think comes with this kind of decision.
Every decision became very simple. Door. Shoes—no. Not necessary. Keys—no. Not coming back. The world reduced itself into instructions and I followed them because thinking hurt too much.
The night air was cold. The moon was thin and pale, stretched across the water like a scar. The ocean looked endless. Not violent. Not cruel. Just… final.
That felt right. Not peace. Not relief.
An end.
I walked because stopping would have required a reason, and I no longer had one. My thoughts weren’t loud. They were quiet and certain.
He doesn’t want me. He’s leaving. This always happens. There is nothing after this anyway.
Love was the last lie keeping me alive. If he didn’t want it—if he didn’t want me—then there was nothing left that wasn’t just endurance. And I was too tired to keep enduring.
The water kissed the rocks far below like a boundary. The roar of the waves a death knell. I wasn’t thinking about dying. I was thinking about not hurting anymore. Not reaching for someone who wasn’t reaching back. Not waking up into a body that only knew how to ache.
“Why couldn’t I have been enough?” I asked the sky. The words didn’t feel like a question. They felt like a confession. Like something I had been carrying my whole life and had finally found the courage to set down. “Why did no one ever pick me?”
The wind answered by wrapping around me, tugging at my clothes, pressing cold fingers into my skin.
For a moment I let myself pretend it was her.
That it was Mom pulling me into her arms the way she used to when I cried too hard to breathe.
I tried to imagine her voice telling me I was worth staying for. That life was worth staying for.
But all I could feel was the absence. The hollow where she used to be. The hollow where he had just been.
I had been so close to something I thought was real.
Something I thought was mutual. I had opened myself in ways I didn’t know how to close again.
I had trusted him with parts of me that still felt sacred, even as they hurt.
And now that trust was just… hanging in the air between us with nowhere to land.
I had mistaken safety for forever. I had mistaken being held for being chosen. The realization burned worse than the cold.
My hands shook as I pulled my shirt over my head, the fabric catching briefly in my hair before the wind tore it away from me.
My skin prickled instantly, exposed to the night, to the sky, to the endless dark below.
I stood there bare and shaking and stupidly thought—Is this what I was made for? To give myself away and then disappear?
A sacrifice no one had asked for. A solution no one would thank. A shudder ran through me so hard it stole my breath. My heart felt like it was trying to claw its way out of my chest.
“There’s nothing left for me now,” I whispered.
My toes curled into the wet earth at the cliff’s edge. The ground was cold and uneven beneath me. Stone bit into the soles of my feet, sharp and grounding and cruel. It felt right that it hurt.
A single tear slid down my cheek and vanished into the wind before it could fall.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t enough for you,” I said to the dark. To the ocean. To him. To the ghost of everything I thought I could have been. “I think I’ve loved you since the night you held me on the deck. I think that’s when everything in me changed—”
I didn’t let myself finish. If I finished, I might stop. So I stepped back. And then I ran.
The world narrowed to motion and wind and the sound of my own breath tearing in and out of my chest. The edge disappeared beneath my feet. Fear never arrived. There was only release. Only weightlessness. Only the strange, soft sensation of letting go.
The wind roared past me. Salt sprayed my face. The sky spun. A sound tore out of my throat—not quite a scream, not quite a cry—something between grief and surrender.
Down.
Down.
Down.
“ELLIOT!”
His voice cut through the dark like a wound. Raw. Terrified. My name pulled into a shape I almost recognized as love.
It was the last thing I heard. The world hit me and disappeared at the same time. Cold swallowed me whole. Sound vanished. Light vanished. Everything became pressure and dark and silence.
“Elliot!”
My name came through wrong—stretched thin, warped, broken—dragged through something thick and heavy that didn’t want to let sound pass through it at all. But it was still my name. I felt it before I understood it, a faint tug somewhere inside my chest, like a thread being pulled from very far away.
Hands grabbed me—rough, desperate, shaking.
Hands that didn’t ask permission. They closed around me with a kind of desperation that felt almost violent in its tenderness, like he was afraid I might dissolve if he didn’t hold tight enough, like he was trying to keep me assembled through sheer force of will.
I didn’t fight him.
I didn’t help either.
Couldn’t remember how to move my arms or legs in any way that meant yes or no. I was too tired to choose. Too empty to care. Too stunned by the simple, impossible fact that he had come at all.
When my head broke the surface, the world returned in pieces instead of all at once.
Cold air burned my lungs. Sound rushed back in too loud, too sharp.
My vision flickered and blurred like an old film reel skipping frames.
I couldn’t tell where my body ended and the water began—I felt poured into the world instead of separate from it.
Mom’s voice brushed the edges of my thoughts. Not loud. Not clear. Just a softness. A warmth. The echo of something that had once kept me safe.
Calling me home.
Anthony’s arms locked around me like iron.
Like prayer. Like something sacred and frantic all at once.
His chest heaved against my back. His hands were trembling so badly I could feel it in my bones.
He was crying—not quietly, not carefully—but in broken, tearing sounds like something inside him had split open and didn’t know how to close again.
“Don’t you fucking leave me,” he sobbed into my hair. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking dare.”
The words hit me harder than the cold had. Harder than the fall.
I wanted to tell him I wasn’t trying to.
That I just hadn’t known how to stay.
But my mouth wouldn’t work. My body wouldn’t listen. All I could do was hang there in his arms like something found instead of something saved.
Voices crowded in around us. Shapes and movement and light pressed against my closed eyes. Hands touched my shoulders, my wrists, my face. I couldn’t make sense of any of it.
“Sir, you shouldn’t have—”
“Like fuck I wasn’t going to save him.”
“You need to let us—”
“Hello, my sweet boy.”
The world softened. Not faded. Softened. Like someone had turned the edges down. I didn’t feel anything anymore.
“Mom…”
That was the last thing I remembered.