Chapter 41 #5
I love you so fucking much, and it terrifies me because I know what I’m capable of, and I know that I will only end up ruining you.
Last night was the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and I hope that’s not just pathetic.
I know you think I’m going to say it was a mistake, but it wasn’t.
Not even a little. You are the only good thing I’ve ever had.
I don’t know how to be honest with you without burning it all down, but I’m going to try, because you deserve at least that.
I’ve been a monster ever since my mom left, ever since my dad punched a hole in the wall and looked at me like I was next.
Anger and violence is all I know. I’m trying so fucking hard to be better, to know better, but I know I will give in to the darkness that haunts me.
When I was in the motel bathroom, I thought I saw the ghost of my dad, or heard him, and he was fucking with my head.
I realized I couldn’t do this.
So, I’m letting you go.
I want you to call Dante. As much as it pisses me off to think about him touching you the way I did, he is the better choice.
He will take care of you the way you deserve to be taken care of.
He is the only person I trust enough to not hurt you because I don’t even trust myself.
I know he would jump at the opportunity to be with you. That bastard has liked you a long time.
My selfish need for you made me forget that he is the better choice.
I would try, but I know I would fuck it up eventually. I don’t want to corrupt you anymore.
I love you, Amelia. I think I always did. But my anger, my hatred, and my wounds got in the way for so long. I started to forget why I even wanted you when I was a kid. But then we reunited in Colorado.
I was annoyed as fuck at first. I still despised you. But you slowly started to break down my walls of hatred, and I slowly started feeling compassion and affection for you, especially when we were in that cage.
I loved you and I hated you, but it became so damn blurred in my head to where I believed I only hated you and that I had to ruin you because you were Judy’s daughter, and god forbid my father found out I ached for you. Hating you was easier than wanting you, and it became engraved into my blood.
Now, I just love you and I want you to be happy even if it means I can’t have you.
I am so sorry for all the pain that I had caused you in my lifetime. Maybe one day we can get it right between us but for now, I need to leave.
I will always love you. I hope you will remember that night in the motel too.
I know I will. The whole car ride back I was lost in my own head, thinking about how fucking amazing it was with you, how good it felt.
And I kept thinking about how painful it would feel to break you.
I don’t want to break you, but I’m a disaster and I have so many fucked up issues, you are better off without me.
I really am so sorry.
Caiden
I read the letter again. And again. Until the words blurred and I realized my eyes were leaking, slow and silent, salt burning into the creases of my lips.
There was no comfort in it, just a deeper, more intricate loneliness, a black lace that stitched through every hollowed-out space in my body. It was the most honest thing Caiden had ever given me, and that was what made it hurt the most. He could only be real at a distance.
For a long time, I just sat there, the letter limp in my lap. The ache inside me had a new shape now, and it was his name.
I wanted to call him. I wanted to scream at him for being a coward, for running, for refusing to believe that I could want him even after everything.
I wanted to drive out to wherever he was and stand in the middle of the road and dare him to run me over, because at least then I’d know he still saw me.
But I did nothing. I couldn’t even move.
I folded the letter and pressed it to my chest, as if I could imprint the heat of his words into my skin. I didn’t sob, not anymore. I just breathed, slow and ragged, feeling the hollow space where hope had lived, now scorched clean.
I curled up on the empty mattress, the paper crumpled in my fist and tried to convince myself that this was kindness.
That he meant it, that letting go was his last, best attempt at love.
But every line in his letter was a wound, a raw slice through whatever defenses I’d built against being abandoned.
The old ache came back, sharper and more familiar than the first time my own father left, and I hated how my body recognized it, how it trembled and folded in the exact same way. It resembled that ache I felt as I laid over my mother’s grave, sobbing.
Come back. Come back. Come back.
I lay there for hours, slipping between stunned silence and the kind of crying that left my face sticky and salt-burnt, my lungs aching from the violence of it.
I couldn’t even think around the endless loop of his handwriting, the way I love you was scrawled so angry and real, the way he’d called himself a coward, the way he’d told me to go to Dante.
I wondered if I was supposed to be angry. It would have been easier to hate him, to burn up all my longing with a wildfire of rage, but all I could feel was this aching, bottomless loss.
I lay there, replaying every second since I reunited with him.
Every look, every word, every accidental touch that could have maybe meant more than it seemed. I thought about the way Caiden had looked at me in the car, the hollow ache in his eyes, how he’d gripped the steering wheel so tight it seemed like he wanted to strangle the world itself.
I thought about the motel, the wildness of his hands, the way he’d held me after like he was afraid I might disappear if he let go. I thought about the lake, the funeral, the beach, the wilderness.
He’d warned me a thousand times, in a thousand ways, that he was a black hole, a self-fulfilling prophecy of disaster.
But I’d wanted him anyway. Maybe that made me just as broken, or maybe it made me the only one who understood how to love someone like that, not by fixing them, but by wanting them.
I tried to picture the future, the one he’d written for me, the one where I called Dante, where I let myself be chosen by someone who could love without biting.
I pictured Sabrina with her perfect life, her kind husband, and her warm kitchen, and I tried to imagine myself in it, eating pancakes and laughing at the old pain as if it had never been anything but a joke.
But I didn’t want that. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
I wanted to want it. I wanted to be the kind of girl who could choose peace over chaos, who could let the bad men go and not chase them through every burning house they built behind them.
But I wasn’t her. I was just the girl on the mattress, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the world to end or restart, whichever would come first.
I made a promise to the dark.
If Caiden ever came back, I’d wait. I’d wait until the stars flickered out and the sun went cold, and if he asked, I’d crawl into hell with him with both hands open.
I closed my eyes and let the grief finish its work. I let myself bleed, let the ache become the only thing I had left of him. I waited for the world to crack open and swallow me, but all it did was keep turning, slow and merciless, grinding every hour down to dust.
Caiden was my enemy, the monster who I hated. Then, he became the source of my hunger. And now? He became the man that I loved. And lost.