Chapter 41 #3
I thought about what it meant, that he wouldn’t even look at me after last night. Maybe he was ashamed. Maybe he was disappointed, or maybe he’d just wanted to prove something to himself, and now the experiment was over.
I wondered if he’d just done it to get it out of his system. To fuck me until the craving went away, or until I stopped being a mystery and started being a mistake.
The possibility made my chest go cold, a hollow ache carving out a space just below my ribs.
We hit the outskirts of Roanoke around dusk. The city lit up in the valley, neon strip malls and fluorescent gas stations flickering to life as the sun bled out behind the mountains. The interstate was clogged with minivans and delivery trucks.
I counted the miles it would take to get us home and wondered if I’d be able to bear it.
By the time the sun started to crawl down the sky, I’d exhausted every internal monologue.
There were no tears left, just a dull ache that made my whole body feel like a used-up scab.
I thought about Dante, about the way he’d said goodbye without making it a reckoning.
I thought about the look on his face when I told him I needed to see where this went with Caiden, and the way he’d kissed me, gentle and final, as if he knew the ending already and just wanted to savor the middle while it lasted.
I wondered if that was how Caiden saw the world, too.
Everything bright and alive, but only for a moment.
Maybe that was why he couldn’t stand to look at me now, like if he stared too long, the reality of what we’d done in that motel room would cauterize all the hope he’d managed to scrape together.
The silence in the car was a ticking bomb. It pressed in on me, tried to find a way in through my pores, to fill the empty places that had been hollowed out by years of loss and wanting.
I scratched at the inside of my wrist, searching for any sign of life beneath my skin. If I pressed hard enough, I could feel my pulse tapping out a message: you’re here, you’re here, you’re here.
He took the next exit without warning, slamming the blinker so hard I thought it might snap off. The car dove onto a county road, and within minutes the highway was erased, replaced with two-lane blacktop and the humming chorus of cicadas rising under the canopy of trees.
Caiden drove with a tight, aggressive calm, ignoring the way the wheel jerked whenever the tires caught a rut or a pothole. I wondered if he was doing it on purpose, waiting for the road to jar us into some new arrangement, some honest angle of collision.
We briefly stopped at a fast-food restaurant. He ordered us both a meal, and we sat in the car to eat. Once we were done, he sped back out onto the road.
Our town became closer, and suddenly the whole day had drifted by, and we hadn’t talked about anything that mattered.
I felt that tight feeling in my throat. I wanted to cry, but I was desperately holding it back. Wobble of the lip, heaviness of the eyes.
Get it together, Amelia. He’s probably just tired. I’ll just see how he acts tomorrow.
The voice in my head tried to reason with me. It’s been a long journey. He’s tired. He’s dealing with his own inner conflict. It’ll be better tomorrow.
We crossed into the county line just after midnight. The world was reduced to headlights and blacktop, all the color sucked out by darkness and exhaustion.
I watched the shadow of Caiden’s profile. The silence had become unbearable, so I broke it with the most banal question I could imagine: “You want me to put in some music?”
He shook his head, never looking from the road. “I like the quiet.”
“Okay,” I said, and folded my arms, trying to keep the cold from getting inside.
My mind replayed the last forty-eight hours in a stuttering, endless reel: his hands, his mouth, the way he’d held me tight until I believed, for one soft second, that we could outstrip everything we’d ever done to each other.
Now we sat side by side, less than a foot apart but sealed off by a thousand miles of old pain.
He slowed as we approached the turnoff for my neighborhood, which felt like a comment in itself. I saw the street sign coming and felt a dread, the certainty that once we crossed that line, everything would revert to the way it always had been.
He pulled into my driveway.
My house sat there, and suddenly it was a strange sight.
“I’ll walk you up,” he said. “Just to make sure you get in.”
My legs tingled with pins and needles as I stepped out. The air was hot and wet, the kind of southern night that pressed sweat out of your skin even at rest.
I fumbled with my keys and managed to unlock the door.
He followed me into the darkened front hall, the only light coming from the streetlamp that bled through the frosted glass.
For a second, I could almost pretend it was normal: Caiden, walking me to the door like a date after prom, the old ghosts of high school clinging to our heels.
He didn’t linger. He didn’t reach for my hand, or my face, or any of the other places he’d made holy the night before. Instead, he set my bags and my mother’s boxes on the floor, straightened, and looked around, as if searching for an escape hatch.
“I should go,” he said, not quite meeting my eyes. “You look tired.”
I wanted to scream at him to stay, to not leave me alone with the echo of what we’d just become, but the words knotted up in my throat.
Instead, I forced a strained smile. “I am tired. It’s been a long trip.”
He nodded, jaw flexing. Then, without warning, he leaned in and pressed a kiss to my cheek. So soft, so careful, it barely registered as real.
For a second, his lips lingered, and I could feel the heat of him, the hesitation, the unfinished sentence that pulsed between us. His hand rubbed my finger, so delicately.
But then he straightened, let go, and stepped back, hands jammed in his jacket pockets like he was trying to hide the shaking.
“Goodnight, Amelia,” he said. The words hung there, heavy and final.
I watched him retreat down the walk, the darkness swallowing his broad shoulders and the fading glint of his eyes.
I waited for a text that didn’t come. I waited until morning painted the window with the soft light of dawn.
I knew I had to get up and start the day, time kept ticking by, but my body wouldn’t let me. I laid there.
Hoping, wondering, waiting.
I should have showered, but I didn’t want to wash off the remnants of where he touched me.
He’d poofed from my life the way he always did, sudden and silent.
I buried my face in the pillow, mortified at how badly I wanted him to need me. Maybe I was a glutton for humiliation; maybe I just didn’t know how to want anything else.
My phone finally buzzed. I startled upright, almost dropped it. But it wasn’t his name lighting the screen. Just Sabrina, with a string of emoji and the words: you home?
I stared at the message.
Barely awake, I thumbed out a reply.
Yeah, got in late last night. Sorry, passed out. What’s up?
She responded instantly.
Can you come over? I want to hear all about your trip. And I have some bad news.
I let her words soak in. I wanted to stay in bed, to let myself rot in the mess of hopelessness and the smell of motel sex still clinging to my skin, but the lure of Sabrina’s kitchen and her no-bullshit hugs outweighed my turmoil.
I was past noon by the time I dressed, ate a snack, and made it to her house.
It didn’t take her long to open the door for me after I knocked. I stepped inside and was immediately overtaken by her arms pulling me in for a hug.
“Amelia! I’m so glad you got home safely. How was seeing your hometown? And burying your mom?”
The questions tumbled out of her before I’d even slipped my shoes off. I let her hold me, breathing in the vanilla and coconut that always clung to her hair, and for a minute I could almost let myself lean against her, as if I wasn’t one step from melting down into a puddle on her kitchen tile.
“It was a lot,” I said, meaning it. “The funeral was surreal. I had a total breakdown when they were burying her. But it was weird being back there after seven years. Nothing much had changed, though. Just a lot of painful memories.”
Sabrina kept her arms looped around my waist, eyes soft with concern. “God, I wish I could have been there for you. But, um, also not, since I would have made things worse by crying, like, the entire time.”
I almost laughed, but it stuck in my throat.
She turned me loose and led the way to the kitchen, where Shane was already perched at the center island, thumbing through a stack of mail with all the interest of a man sentenced to life in suburbia. He looked up, tried to smile, and offered a half-wave.
“Hey, Amelia. Welcome back to the land of the living,” he said, voice gravelly with sleep or boredom or both.
“Thanks,” I croaked, and made a show of sitting on the stool farthest from him. I felt feral, exposed, like everyone could smell the ruin on me, the way I was barely stitched together.
Sabrina fussed with the coffee maker, then slid a mug across the counter. “Caffeine?” she asked.
“Please.”
She poured, then leaned her elbows on the laminate, brow furrowed. “Tell me everything. I want the uncut, unrated version.”
I blushed so hard I thought my skin would split. The words got stuck behind my teeth, but she just reached out and squeezed my wrist, nodding like she understood the shape of it already.
“Honestly?” I said, voice oddly small. “I don’t even know where to start. It’s like—” I looked down at my hands, wondering how I should convey myself. “Everything people say about closure is complete shit. I feel like I dug up more than I buried.”
She made a sympathetic noise, lips pursed. “You want to talk about it?”
“Not really, but I should.”
We sat in silence as I tried to stitch together some version of the trip that didn’t make me sound like a lunatic. I told her about the funeral, the suffocating smallness of Pathosbury, the way the air there tasted like mold and regret. I told her about my mom’s house and the letter.