Chapter 20
Skylar
By the second time I check my phone, I tell myself I am not checking it.
By the fifth, I tell myself I am checking the time.
By the twelfth, I accept that I am a pathetic woman with a fully charged phone, a caffeine problem, and a heart that apparently has learnt nothing over the past seven years.
Zane said he would call.
He hasn’t.
That’s the problem or at least it’s the one I’m willing to admit to myself as I sit on the couch with my third cup of coffee going cold beside me and my phone face up on the cushion.
He has texted, though.
A few words here and there.
Enough to confirm he still has functioning thumbs and has not been hit by a bus, but the texts are short and clipped. One-word answers. Responses that arrive just long enough after I send something to tell me he read it, sat with it, and chose the smallest possible thing to send back.
Zane: Fine.
Zane: Yeah.
Zane: Later.
Those kinds of answers that technically say nothing is wrong yet somehow manage to say everything is wrong at the same time, which I do not particularly appreciate him deploying on me after I told him I loved him and that I was not running.
The thing behind my ribs gets heavier.
Yesterday morning, he left with my mouth still warm from his. He kissed me after he got dressed. Then again when he was about to leave and rushed back into the room, because neither of us has ever been able to end anything properly when our mouths are involved.
Cassie yelled from her room that if we started again, she would call animal control.
Zane smiled against my mouth as I almost died of embarrassment.
He looked at me before he walked away, and there was something in his face I didn’t know how to handle. Open, certain, and entirely unguarded. The face of a man who has stopped trying to manage what he shows me and has apparently decided to let me see all of it.
“I’ll see you later,” he said.
Not goodbye. Later. And that word followed me all morning like something warm and slightly inconvenient.
Later, while I stood in the shower, smiling into the steam like a complete idiot for no reason I was willing to examine too closely.
Later, while Cassie stared at me over her coffee cup, one eyebrow raised to a height that suggested genuine architectural concern.
“You are glowing,” she said. “Which is concerning because I know what caused it. And now I need bleach for my imagination and possibly my entire memory.”
I stared at those three texts—their clipped, basic words—long enough for the screen to dim itself out of embarrassment on my behalf.
He didn’t call last night like he said he would.
I told myself he was tired. That work ran late and Rainer needed him for something.
That cars break down at inconvenient hours.
That engines throw tantrums and grown men spend entire evenings under hoods, swearing at bolts.
I told myself a lot of sensible shit. The kind you tell yourself when the alternative is admitting that the silence has a shape, that it’s familiar, that you’ve felt it before, and that it cost you everything it had to take.
Morning came.
My phone lit up at seven-twelve.
Zane: Sorry. Something came up and I’m handling it.
I stared at the message until the words stopped looking like words and began to feel like little black hooks.
Something came up and I’m handling it.
I hate that phrase with a specific, well-documented fury that has only deepened over the years spent watching men deploy it as if it were a full explanation rather than a politely slammed door in your face.
It sounds clean. Responsible. Manly in that particular chest-puffing way that men seem to genuinely believe is attractive rather than infuriating.
I’m handling it.
Translation for women who have spent years learning the language of emotionally constipated men: sit quietly, ask nothing, and trust that whatever he is not telling you is somehow for your own good.
Well, fuck that.
I have already lived through one version of Zane deciding what I needed to know and what I did not.
I know exactly what it costs. I’m aware of its shape, its weight, and the specific, particular way it hollows a person out from the inside.
I am not doing that again. Not a second time.
Not after that night when his hands were on my face and his voice said things I had waited years to hear.
Not after what he said and what I said back.
I set my phone face down on the cushion beside me and stare at it as if it has personally offended me.
Cassie watches me from the kitchen. She is eating cereal straight from the box, wearing her oversized black jumper and socks with tiny skulls on them. Her eyeliner from last night is smudged under one eye.
Her gaze moves from my face to the phone, then back to my face.
“For the record,” she says, “you can stop glaring at your phone.”
“I’m not glaring.”
“You absolutely are glaring. That phone is one wrong vibration away from filing for a restraining order.”
I fold my arms across my chest. “Do you have anything useful to say?”
“Usually no.” She shoves a handful of cereal into her mouth and crunches, the unbothered confidence of a woman who has never once in her life respected a silence she did not create.
“Today maybe. Are we mad at Rivera, worried about Rivera, or pretending we are above both while emotionally waterboarding your screen?”
“I’m fine.”
Cassie stops chewing.
That is never a good sign. Cassie stopping mid-cereal is the conversational equivalent of a weather alert.
She lowers the box. “Sky.”
“What?”
“Do not insult me in my own kitchen before coffee has properly entered my bloodstream. You know what fine means when it comes out of your mouth. Fine means the building is on fire and you have decided to stand there and watch the flames.”
“I’m not insulting you.”
I rub my forehead and glance at the yellow blanket, neatly folded at the end of the couch, the one Cassie washed twice because she said once was not enough to spiritually cleanse it of whatever Zane and I had subjected it to.
Cassie sets the cereal box down. The joking drains from her face.
“How long has it been?” she asks.
“That’s not the point.”
“So, not long enough for a missing persons report.”
“Cassie.” I sit up straighter. “The point is, he said everything he said. We did everything we did. Then he walked out of here and started sending me texts that sound like they were written by a man trapped under a truck with one functioning thumb.”
Cassie blinks. “That was vivid.”
“I’m serious.”
I press a hand to my forehead and breathe out slowly.
Anger rises. It is easier than fear. It always has been. Anger stands upright. Anger has somewhere to go. Fear curls into a corner and waits to be proven right. And I have spent enough of my life in that corner to know exactly how the walls feel.
I would rather take my phone, throw it at the wall, and tell myself I am furious because Zane is an emotionally useless asshole who cannot string a sentence together when it matters.
But beneath the fury is fear. Because the last time Zane loved me and then went quiet, I spent years trying to find the edges of the hole he left and to figure out how to fill it. Some part of me still doesn’t fully trust happiness without pain arriving close behind it.
Cassie moves around the bench and sits beside me on the couch, her shoulder pressing against mine in that specific way she has of making contact without announcing it. The way she has always done since we were ten years old and the world was considerably less manageable than it is now.
For once, she doesn’t fill the silence right away. She just lets it sit.
I hate when she gets quiet. Quiet Cassie is serious Cassie.
“Did you fight?” she asks.
“No.”
“Did he seem weird when he left?”
“No.” I turn my attention to the yellow blanket. “You heard him. He couldn’t stop kissing me. He seemed… happy.”
I close my eyes for a second and the image of him that morning comes back uninvited. Tired eyes and a soft mouth, his hand against my face, the way he kissed me before he left, as if walking out the door were something he intended to undo as quickly as possible.
Cassie goes silent again.
“He seemed happy,” I repeat, quieter now. “And then yesterday he said he would call but he did not. This morning he sent something. Said something came up and he is handling it, whatever the fuck that means.”
“It means something came up,” Cassie says.
I turn my head and stare at her.
She lifts both hands. “I know. Wild concept. A man possibly telling the truth in short, infuriating sentences. Call the Vatican. Alert the press. We have witnessed a miracle.”
“Do not defend him.”
“I’m not defending him. I’m defending reality against your trauma response, which has apparently stolen a car and is driving it straight into a brick wall at full speed.”
“He could have called,” I say.
“Yes.”
“He could have sent more than seven fucking words.”
“Absolutely.”
I look at her. “Then why are you looking at me like I am the problem?”
“I’m not looking at you like you are the problem,” Cassie says. “I’m looking at you like you’re about to write the ending before you know anything about the middle.”
I turn away.
She keeps going anyway because Cassie has never once in her life respected a closed emotional door if she thinks there is a chance she can kick it open with love.
“Last time, he made a choice for both of you,” she says. “A terrible one. A dickhead masterpiece, honestly. Ten out of ten for dramatic damage. Zero out of ten for basic human communication.”
My throat burns. “I don’t want to be that girl again,” I say.
Cassie’s expression softens at the edges. “Which girl?”
“The one waiting for him to decide what I get to know.” I look at the phone on the cushion.
“The one staring at a screen, trying to figure out if she has already lost him and if anyone thought to tell her. The one who kept it all so neatly contained while she fell apart on the inside and called it being fine.”