Chapter 22 #2
I just want her.
I need her.
I need her in my arms.
In my bed.
In my heart and by my side.
My lungs feel compressed as I ride home, the fear that longing brings with it clenching up tight inside of me, pinching my insides until they’re a churning mess.
I’m not used to this. To any of it. To feeling and feeling so deeply.
For a man who tried to shut that shit down, it’s a deluge that I have no idea how to handle.
It hurts, but the pain is so fucking sweet that I would never turn it off or shut it out again.
I park my bike by the house and stride up the porch steps.
I throw open the door and half expect to be bowled over by Leena, she looked so worried when I left.
I nearly expected her to be waiting by the door for me.
I want her to be. I want her to erase the shitstorm that’s raging inside of me, to wipe that slate clean with her tender caresses and her sweet kisses. She’s not.
Nothing. The house is silent.
A minute passes.
Two.
Then Abby comes running, barking and slobbering and winding herself around me even though she’s dragging her back legs, not in her wheelchair at all.
I pet her, pick her up and let her bathe my face in her doggy scented kisses.
“Leena?” I call, when I set her down.
The house is quiet. Too quiet.
Something isn’t right.
I realize it before I even stalk into the kitchen and see the mess of baking bowls and pans, the ingredients set out on the countertop, at odds with the silence, that nothing is ever going to be the same for me again.
I might have recovered from anyone else, but not from Leena.
Now that I’ve had her, made her mine, it’s impossible to think of living without her.
Amidst the chaos and baking clutter, there’s a white slip of paper set on the kitchen counter. I scan the neat little words, written there in actual cursive. It’s pretty, dainty, and soulful in a way that is decidedly old, just like the woman it belongs to.
My heart lurches painfully, like someone stabbed a knife up into my midsection and twisted, the blade long enough to rip a path of devastation the entire way, right until it reached the beating organ buried beneath my ribs.
Every word I read guts me further, until I feel cut up, shredded, my guts laying out on the floor, the blood pooling out of me in thick, hot streams.
Wraith.
I’m sorry. I just can’t do this. I know that we shared a few moments over the past days, but I can’t stay here, locked away, living my life like a lie.
I’ve thought about everything that you told me, about how broken your past is, and I just know that we won’t be a good match and that all of this will only make us both unhappy.
I’ve tried to be kind my whole life and that translated into me lying to you.
I know that it will only be a matter of time before your past comes back to haunt you.
Both of us. I can’t live like that. With you.
Knowing what happened. Ami got out. Steph and I decided to do the same.
She came and got me and we’ve gone. We aren’t coming back and you won’t find us, so please don’t try. We’ll both be happier this way.
Leena
Because Abby is wound around my feet, she whines when my hand chokes the letter, crumpling the paper ruthlessly. She whines when she looks up at me with her big, brown eyes, breaking the last remaining shards of my soul.
How could she leave me? How could everything she told me be a lie?
I’ve never told a soul my secrets. I trusted her with everything that happened to me.
Everything I was and am. I was a fucking idiot, seduced by a pretty face and fooled by a tight cunt.
I let that deceive me into thinking I’d found something, into thinking that I could, a bastard like me, learn to feel.
I dared to think that I could even be loved.
What a fucking joke.
I want to rage. I want to kick in the cupboard doors and put my fist through the wall, smash the windows and break every single dish in the place.
In short, I want to go fucking apeshit on the kitchen.
I want to rage until the wounds slashed all over my soul, gutting the hell out of me, have time to scab the fuck over and keep me from bleeding out until I die.
It shouldn’t feel like this. It shouldn’t fucking matter this much.
But it does. It fucking does, and that slays me.
Abby whines again and I barely refrain from joining her, from screaming in pain like a wounded animal.
I know it would terrify her though, and she’s seen enough terror in her life, so I grind my teeth to dust and bite down hard on my cheek until I taste the rich flow of coppery blood over my tongue.
I breathe so hard that I nearly burst my lungs.
I’m pathetic. She knew it. She fucking knew it and she didn’t want to soil herself, degrade herself, with someone like me.
A man who let another man force him to do shit to his own body.
It doesn’t matter that I was little more than a kid and couldn’t have stood up for myself.
That I was terrified for my mother’s life and for my own.
That when I did finally grow up enough to beat the bastard within an inch of his life and leave, it was already too late.
Those marks were imprinted on my soul for good.
I see fucking black as I unfold the tightly clenched ball of paper from my damp fists. I smooth the edges out, caressing it like a lover betrayed. That’s exactly what I am. I trusted Leena. I opened myself up for the first time in my fucking life and she drove that knife in deep.
My entire body shakes with pain and barely restrained fury as I set the note back on the counter. I close my eyes. Open them. Close them again. Open. Because I’m a sucker for fucking punishment, a masochist of the worst kind, I grip that thin sheet of paper again.
It’s so thin that the damp of my palms renders it nearly translucent.
And that’s when I see it. The dark smudge on the back, bleeding through the front.
I turn the page over so quickly that I nearly drop it.
My lungs deflate along with the rest of me, my body bowing and sagging, half with a terrible relief, the other half with a sick kind of horror that hurts me far worse than the words on the other side of the pain, because those six words tell me that I’ve failed in every possible way.
My truth will always be you.