Chapter 34
Zane
The door clangs shut behind me.
I swear that sound is gonna haunt me for the rest of my fucking life.
The cell’s small.
Ten steps from one end to the other if I push it.
Thin-ass mattress on a slab of metal that barely qualifies as a bed.
No pillow. A steel toilet in the corner reeking worse than it looks.
The walls are stained with a hundred lives that passed through before me.
The light above flickers with a kind of desperate rhythm.
This is it.
Home.
For the next seven fucking years.
I walk straight to the bed and drop down.
Fuck.
I can still see it. The second it landed. The way her eyes went wide, stunned and full of tears she refused to let fall. The way her lips parted to survive the hit.
And I fucking broke her.
With the one thing she trusted.
Me.
My voice.
The same mouth, once telling her she was the only goddamn thing that ever made sense.
I told her she was nothing. Called her an easy fuck. Told her I never loved her.
And I watched it crush her.
Watched her pull into herself, small and shaking, trying to hold it together in a room full of strangers while I sat there pretending it didn’t kill me to do it.
But it did.
It felt like driving a fucking sledgehammer into my own chest. Blow after blow, straight to the ribs.
I wanted to throw the table across the room and pull her into my arms and tell her the truth.
That she is everything.
That I fucking love her with a force strong enough to burn this place to the ground.
That I see her when I close my eyes. Hear her voice when this place gets too quiet.
But I can’t let her ruin her life for me.
She doesn’t belong in this world.
Not during visiting hours and scheduled phone calls.
She deserves more than the walls closing in around me. She deserves more than a boy who’s nothing but a record and a number now.
So I did the only thing I could.
I pushed her away hard enough to make sure she wouldn’t come back.
And it fucking hurts.
God, it’s fucking killing me.
Every breath. Every second since I walked out of that room.
But the pain is easier to carry than the thought of her throwing her entire future away for a broken boy with blood on his hands.
I’ll take this punishment.
I’ll take the sentence.
But I won’t take her down with me.
My shoulders shake. My chest caves in on itself until it feels like the air’s been stripped right out of me. My throat burns. I try to swallow it down, bury it deep where everything else lives, but it’s no good.
I cry.
For the first time in my life, I fucking cry.
The sound ripping out of me doesn’t even sound human.
Through all the foster homes. The cracked walls and cold floors.
The fists, the belts. The nights I lay in bed hungry because someone else got the last piece of bread.
Through every bruise that faded. Every rib that healed crooked.
Every social worker who said, “You’ll be okay” and then left me to rot.
I never cried.
Not once.
But now, sitting in this cell with her name still breaking through my teeth, I can’t stop.
Because losing Skylar isn’t another hit to survive.
I know that it’ll be the one that fucking ends me.
This is only the beginning for Zane and Skylar.
Their story concludes in Forgetting You.