51. Chapter 51
Well, Sadie is gone.
I stand in the doorway long after she leaves, the night air still clinging to the threshold where her body passed through.
The scent of her lingers though; soap, skin, the faint metallic note of adrenaline that always followed her fear.
My hands hang useless at my sides, trying to figure out what the fuck comes next.
I close the door carefully, and I’m not sure why I lock it, but I do.
The sound echoing too loudly in the hollow space she left behind.
Somehow I make it back to our bedroom, my eyes drifting about it.
The bed is wrecked. The sheets tangled and the pillows askew, the indentation of her body still warm where she curled into me only minutes ago.
I drop to the edge of the mattress and stare at the place where her spine had fit so perfectly against my chest.
Three days.
Three damn days of proximity that stripped something out of me I hadn’t realized was still intact, and she ran. I reach up, tracing the spot on my sternum where her head rested.
Love.
The word used to scare me too, but all I find now is a startling clarification.
I have dissected every other emotion I’ve ever experienced down to motive and mechanism.
Love is no different. It’s not mystical and it’s certainly not soft. It’s an attachment response rooted in exclusivity, reinforced by vulnerability, and deepened by shared violence and survival.
Sadie didn’t just survive my world, she so willingly stepped into.
And then she ran.
I lean back, groaning as I stare at the ceiling and replay the moment her breathing changed.
The instant her body recoiled before she could just slow down and talk this through with me.
I hated seeing the switch flip inside of her, the way the past crawled its way forward to drag her under. Fight-or-flight overriding want.
I don’t think she was rejecting me, but she was escaping this pattern she thinks I’m trying to back her into.
Sure, I’m not going to actually let her go anywhere. But she doesn’t need to know that.
She’s wrong to think that leaving is her only form of survival. Leaving in stasis is the same loop she’s been trapped in since she was seventeen. She thinks she’s choosing herself, but all she’s doing is choosing the absence of threat over the presence of truth.
And I won’t allow that.
Not now that I know what this is.
I look to the window at the edge of the bed and let my thoughts sharpen, slotting into place like pieces of a familiar puzzle. I can’t rush this or spiral, so I will plan.
She will go back to her routines, I’m sure. The bar. The bus. Imogen. She will tell herself she did the right thing. She will avoid thinking about me the way she always avoids the things that crack her open, but her body won’t forget.
Her body already knows me.
I smile faintly at that.
Love, for me, is not just possession. Or at least it can’t be so simply defined. She has become the axis in which everything rotates around. My work. My patience. My restraint. Every decision from this moment is filtered through one question:
How do I bring her back to me?
I can’t chase her recklessly. That would only confirm her fear. I can’t corner her or force her hand either. She needs to come to the conclusion herself to choose me the way she chose blood on her hands without flinching.
She needs to understand that loving me doesn’t erase her autonomy. It only redefines it.
I retrieve my phone and thumb open the calendar. Her absence won’t disrupt my schedule, it’ll just alter its focus. A new timeline emerges as I open sessions and defer some of the plans I had before.
This is okay, I tell myself.
I can give her space.
Let her miss me and let the silence do its work. The absence will eventually begin to itch. I’m sure she’ll try to distract herself by replacing me, and prove to herself that she’s fine with this.
She won’t succeed.
No one else will ever know her the way I do. They won’t see the violence and tenderness braided together and not try to separate them.
I don’t need to convince her to love me. I need to show her that she already does, and that running won’t save her from that very simple truth.