Page 12 of Beautiful Ruins
One thing I did know was there was no way I was getting him up the stairs inside his house.
The porch light flickered as we reached his front steps, casting him in and out of shadow like some reluctant ghost. I fought the urge to shove him inside and let him fend for himself. I wanted to, just to see how he would react. But I couldn’t. Not when he was like this.
I fumbled the door open and nearly fell with him as we crossed the threshold—me half-carrying, half-dragging his dead weight inside. Every step jarred my ribs. Every breath tasted like regret.
The living room was a time capsule, stuck in the same moment I’d left it. Same tan leather couch, now showing its age. Whiskey bottles stacked together like they were being showcased. Magazines scattered like remnants of old conversations.
Tears stung my eyes, blinding me to the truth of what stood before me. I wanted to cry, to scream, to let it all out.
But I didn’t. I wouldn’t allow myself that moment of weakness. I just stood there, Rowan’s dead weight dragging me down, and let the exhaustion of the last week wash over me. It was a bone deep tiredness, one untouched by any amount of rest. I understood that it wasn’t from lack of sleep—this was a tiredness that only came with giving up.
It was too much. All of it. Too much and somehow not enough, all at once. Like coming back to a place that should’ve felt like home but was really just another prison.
It hadn’t always been that way. Logan’s house had always felt like home, more than mine ever had. Then he killed himself.
I couldn’t do this. Not again. I had to get out of there.
I swallowed the tightness in my throat, and moved toward the couch, Rowan mumbling incoherently, his breath warm against my cheek. He had no choice but to follow me.
The springs creaked under Rowan’s weight as I dropped him onto the creased leather. He groaned, his eyes remaining closed.
Thank God. He was such a pain in my arse already, and I’d only been home a total of twelve hours. Exhaling, I leaned against the wall and sucked in breath after breath. He looked peaceful, lost in some drunken dream where things made sense. Would he let me join him in there?
Sense was something I was lacking at that moment.
“Damn it, Ro,” I mumbled, my anger burned out.
For a long moment, I just stood there, watching him. Watching the rise and fall of his chest, the same chest I’d only once pressed my ear to, listening for the rhythm of his heart like it was my own. It had been all I could do the night we’d found Logan, the only time Rowan had wrapped me in his arms, and it was all because my best friend had killed himself.
Rowan’s breathing shifted, a soft murmur escaping his lips. Words, almost unintelligible but sharp as knives, cut through the silence and stabbed into me.
“Just back to break my heart again.” They were raw, unguarded considering this was Rowan of all people.
It had been hard enough back when he was fourteen to get him to admit he was in pain after breaking his arm from fallingout of a tree. Yet, there he was, mumbling about broken hearts in his sleep. He was acting like I owed him something, and I suppose I did.
But I wasn’t ready for that just yet. I was too tired to understand what his words meant, too tired to do anything but stand there and take it.
A light sheen of sweat coated my skin, the room closing in around me, suffocating. The weight of the past pressed down on me until I thought I’d choke on it.
Rowan’s breath hitched again, and I froze, bracing for more words, more confessions from the depths of his sleep. But none came. Just the soft hush of unconsciousness and the ache he left behind.
Memories crashed over me, of the day I’d left, the way I’d run from him like a coward, afraid to face the storm that was coming. Now, with Rowan out cold, the house loomed large, a cavernous void sucking me right back in. Maybe it always had been that way.
My gaze drifted to the stairway just off the living room. It stretched long and dark, like a tunnel into everything I wasn’t ready to face.
My feet carried me up the stairs before I realised I’d moved. The carpet whispered beneath each step, the air colder the higher I went.
Logan’s door stood before me, closed tight, but it may as well have been wide open, the way it sucked me in and ripped me apart. I’d barely survived living there the first time, yet there I was again, caught in the same damn trap.
It would’ve been laughable if it hadn’t felt like punishment. If it hadn’t been so fucking tragic.
My pulse pounded inside my head, throbbing against my skull. My body locked up tight, my muscles vibrating. I knewwhat was behind that door, and I wasn’t ready to face it. I might have never been ready.
Logan’s room. The place he had ended everything. Where he thought things through and decided that I was better off without him. He’d never left it tidy, not once in his life. It had always been a disaster, like his brain was too busy coming up with ways to cause trouble to bother with things like picking up his dirty laundry or making his bed. The last time I’d seen it, his clothes were everywhere, spilling out of drawers and off the back of his chair.
And he was hanging in the middle of it all.
How could he have done that to me? We had our lives planned out, at least until reality beckoned and we’d have had to settle down and make something of ourselves.
