Chapter 20 #2
“You’re not that girl anymore, Sky.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because that girl would have swallowed this whole,” Cassie says. “She would have let it sit inside her, rot, and smile through it, never saying a word to anyone, including me.”
Her shoulder presses into mine and she looks at me steadily. “You would have kept it to yourself until it poisoned you, then called that being strong. You told me. That is not nothing, Sky. That’s not the girl you used to be.”
I look at her. “Don’t be proud of this version of me. She’s unstable.”
Cassie’s mouth smirks. “My favorite women always are.”
I look down at her hand on my wrist. The pressure grounds me.
“What do I do?” I ask, the question feeling too small for how much it costs me to say out loud.
Cassie’s face loses the last trace of teasing. “You fucking ask him.”
“I did.”
“No.” She tilts her head. “You waited by your phone, hoping he would suddenly develop the emotional vocabulary of a fully functioning adult. That is not asking. That’s just wishing on a man, which, historically, has a terrible return rate.”
I glare at her.
She ignores it with the practiced ease of someone who has been on the receiving end of my glare for sixteen years and has never found it persuasive.
“Ask him properly,” she says. “And in case you need a definition, that means you find out what is going on without wrapping the question in so much barbed wire that he bleeds before he can answer it.”
I reach for my phone, then stop before touching it.
My fingers hover above the screen.
The old instinct fires immediately, loud and familiar.
Do not text first.
Do not let him see that it got to you.
Keep it all contained and controlled. Keep the surface smooth and let nothing through that could hurt you later. That instinct kept me alive in places, but it also left me lonelier and heartbroken than I needed to be for longer than I should have allowed.
But I am not that girl anymore. I owe her that much, the ten-year-old with her bag still packed at the foot of the bed, who swore she would never let anyone make her invisible again. I am in control of my life. I am not about to let a man, even Zane Rivera, dictate how I move through it.
I pick up the phone and the screen wakes.
My stomach dips and there is his last message, sitting exactly where I left it.
Cassie leans in.
I turn the screen away from her. “Privacy.”
“I saw your bare ass on my couch, Skylar. We are well past privacy. We passed it about six exits ago and kept driving.”
“Cassie.”
“Fine.” She leans back, then immediately angles her head to see anyway.
I shove her shoulder without looking up, staring at the empty message box, trying to figure out what to say to him, which should not be this hard but somehow is.
My thumb hovers.
I type.
Then delete.
Then type again, different words, then delete those too.
Cassie waits twelve whole seconds, before saying, “Do you want me to help?”
“No.”
She opens her mouth.
“No, Cassie.”
She closes it.
I breathe in slowly and type again before I can talk myself out of it.
Before the old instinct can rise again to remind me of all the reasons showing someone what they mean to you is a liability.
Skylar: I don’t know what’s going on but I’m not doing silence with you. Not after the other night. If you need space say that. If something happened tell me. But don’t disappear and expect me not to feel it.
I read it once.
Twice.
My finger hovers over send and my chest is doing something I don’t have a dignified word for.
I hit send and the message leaves.
I stare at the screen.
The little delivered notification appears beneath it and my stomach turns over once.
“Maybe it was too much, Cass.”
Cassie moves in close enough that her knee presses against mine and I can smell her vanilla body spray.
“It was not too much, Sky,” she says, and her voice has none of its usual performance. “You asked the man who told you he loved you not to disappear into vague bullshit twenty-four hours later. That’s not too much. That’s the bare fucking minimum and you’re allowed to ask for it.”
Her eyes sharpen. “You are not too much because you need clarity after a lifetime of people leaving without explanation. You are not too much because old wounds still hurt when someone presses near them. That is not weakness. That’s just what wounds do.”
My throat hurts.
“And if Zane Rivera cannot handle one honest text from the woman he claims to love after everything that man has put you through,” Cassie says, with the calm certainty of someone announcing a business decision, “I will personally kick his emotionally damaged ass so hard that his cock files a formal complaint with the relevant authorities.”
A laugh breaks through my tears before I can stop it.
The phone lights up causing both of us to freeze.
My heart goes stupidly, completely still.
Cassie leans in and whispers, “Well, fuck me. That brooding garage goblin has found his way back from the emotional wilderness.”
I snatch the phone off the cushion before she can get anywhere near it.
My hands go cold around the screen. For one second, I can’t bring myself to open it. I just sit here, holding the phone, which is pathetic, and I am fully aware of that, yet I cannot seem to do anything about it.
Coward.
I hate that word. But most of all, I hate that it belongs to me right now.
I open it.
Zane: I’m sorry, Sky. Let me pick you up after work tomorrow. There’s something I need to do here with Rainer first. Then I’ll tell you everything. I promise.
I text back before I have finished thinking, my heart going too fast, the question already in my chest before it reaches my thumbs.
Skylar: Is Rainer okay?
Because Rainer is not just Zane’s person.
He’s mine too, in a quiet way I have never known how to say out loud.
The man who found me drowning in grief after Zane went away, handed me an apartment, and asked for nothing.
Who has never, in all the years I have known him, made me feel like I was too much or not enough or anything other than exactly who I was supposed to be.
If something has happened to him…
The typing indicator appears and a text message comes through.
Zane: Yeah. He’s okay. I’ll explain tomorrow. I love you.
I stare at those last three words for a long moment before my thumbs move.
Skylar: I love you too.
The words blur.
I blink hard and fast because I have already cried once this morning, and I have limits.
Cassie shifts beside me. “Well?”
I hand her the phone because words seem to be failing me right now.
She reads it before passing the phone back. She gets up, walks to the kitchen, picks up her cereal box, and shakes it.
“Do you want some breakfast?”