The hurt in his eyes.
The devastation.
“I love you.”
Stop.
I twisted the throttle harder. The engine screamed as I pushed the bike faster. The wind whipped around me, tearing at my hair, stinging my eyes, drowning out the sound of my own thoughts.
But it wasn’t enough. Nothing was ever enough to drown outhim.
By the second day, I was running on fumes.
I stopped once, maybe twice, at gas stations where I filled the tank with shaking hands and bought coffee I couldn’t taste. My reflection in the bathroom mirror was a stranger: hollow eyes, wind-burned cheeks, lips cracked and bleeding from the relentless assault of the road.
I looked like a ghost.
You are a ghost. You’ve been running for so long you’ve forgotten how to be real.
I splashed cold water on my face and forced myself to keep moving. To keep riding. Because if I stopped, if I let myself think for even a second, I would fall apart completely, and I couldn’t afford to fall apart. Not yet.
The road stretched endlessly ahead of me, a ribbon of asphalt cutting through fields and forests and small towns that blurred together into meaningless shapes. I rode through rain that soaked me to the bone and sunshine that burned my skin. I rode until my muscles screamed and my vision doubled, and I couldn’t remember what state I was in or how long I had been riding.
All I knew was that I had to keep going.
Because stopping meant facing the truth.
And the truth was too fucking terrifying to face.
It was the third night, or maybe the fourth, when I lost track, and I finally admitted it to myself. I was riding through Georgia, the air thick and humid, the sky a bruised purple as the sun set behind me. My body was beyond exhausted. My hands were blistered. My back ached so badly that I could barely sit upright, and all I could see washis face.
The way he looked at me in Maverick’s office. The desperation in his eyes when he begged me to give him another chance. The raw, unfiltered vulnerability when he said he didn’t want to be the monster anymore.
“I love you.”
I told him it was nothing. Told him it was just sex. Told him to leave.
And the look on his face when I said it,God forgive me,it had destroyed him.
I saw it. Saw the way his expression crumbled, the way his shoulders sagged, the way he nodded and walked away like I had just ripped his heart out and handed it back to him in pieces.
And I let him go.
Why? Why did you do that?
Because I was terrified. Because trusting him meant risking everything. Because loving him meant surrendering to the one person who had the power to destroy me completely.
Because I was a fucking coward.
The realization hit me like a physical blow, and I had to pull over to the side of the road before I crashed. I killed the engine and sat there, straddling the bike, my hands gripping the handlebars so tight my knuckles turned white, and then I screamed.
It tore out of me, raw and primal and filled with every ounce of rage and grief and self-loathing I had been carrying formonths. I screamed until my throat was raw, until my voice gave out, until there was nothing left but the sound of my own ragged breathing and the distant hum of traffic on the highway.
You love him.
The thought was quiet. Insidious. Undeniable.
You love him, and you pushed him away because you’re too fucking scared to admit it.
