Page 23 of If He Hadn't Cheated
I don’t sleep. I sit on the floor in the dark, back against the couch, staring at nothing. My body aches. My chest is tight. My mouth is dry, but I don’t want water. I want to feel numb. I want something to erase the taste of hope.
Because hope is a trap.
I close my eyes and lean my head back. I see Sebastian. I see him the night he proposed. On one knee. Hands shaking. Voice breaking. I thought it was love. Now I know it was possession. It was the idea of me and nothing more.Control in disguise. He wanted me tamed.
Contained.
Owned.
Unavailable to the one my eyes drifted to first.
Knox doesn’t want anything from me. And that’s what scares me the most. Because if he’s not trying to win me, then why do I still want to run?
The next morning, I wake to my phone buzzing.
Knox: You up?
I stare at it for a long time before replying.
Lana: Barely.
Knox: Coffee?
I hesitate.
Lana: Why?
His response comes fast:
Knox: Because you need a reason not to disappear today.
I don’t cry. But I want to.
I throw on jeans and a hoodie and meet him downstairs twenty minutes later. He’s parked across the street, leaned against his car with two cups in his hands. One black coffee. The other’s got my name on the lid, misspelled. Two Ns instead of one.
I take it without a word and sip. Too sweet. Just how I like it. We walk in silence for a while, down streets I never noticed in daylight before. The city feels different like this, quiet, ordinary, honest.
“Do you ever stop moving?” I ask.
He glances at me. “I try not to.”
“Why?”
“Stillness hurts.”
I stop walking. “Exactly,” I whisper.
He looks at me, eyes steady. “That’s why you live like you’re running from a fire.”
I swallow hard. “Aren’t we all?”
“Some people run away from the flames. You run into them.”
I shrug. “At least they’re warm.”
We reach a bench in a small park, and I sit, exhausted from a fifteen-minute walk. Knox doesn’t sit. He stands beside me, watching a kid in a red hoodie chase pigeons near a fountain.
“He doesn’t know anything yet,” I say. “About how it feels to lose yourself.”
