Page 58 of Hollowed

Not the suffocating kind, not the kind that scraped against the walls of my chest like a scream. This was different. This was silence with breath still inside it. Like he had only just left.

The robe he had wrapped me in the night before was still damp with our sweat. I didn’t push it off. I pulled it tighter. Drew it against my body like it could hold the shape of his chest a little longer. The place between my legs was tender, slick, aching in a way that felt less like aftermath and more like memory.

And beneath that ache was the certainty: he would touch me again.

Not because he had to.

Because he couldn’t help it.

But he wasn’t there now.

And I felt the shape of his absence more acutely than I expected.

The chapel was quiet. Still dark in places where the light hadn’t yet returned. But it was not untouched.

Someone had placed a folded cloth beside me. Clean. Warm.

A small basin of water. A strip of linen. A piece of bread wrapped in waxed paper.

And there—beside it all—was my robe.

Folded.

Deliberately.

Like reverence.

Like he had touched it after I slept, and wanted me to know he had handled it not as clothing, but as skin.

I didn’t cry.

But I almost did.

Because there was something more brutal about this than any of the times he’d pinned me down. Something more intimate than the teeth he’d buried in my shoulder. Something I didn’t know what to do with.

Care.

Not romance.

Not tenderness.

But attention.

He had seen me at my most obscene. Spread. Dripping. Screaming beneath him. And now he had left me wrapped in silence, fed, clothed, covered.

Not discarded.

Kept.

I sat with that truth—wrapped in his robe, the smell of him still clinging to my skin like benediction.

He had touched every part of me, carved silence into my body with his hands and his vows—and still, he had left me covered.

Not discarded.

Preserved.

And that was worse.

---