My throat hurts.
“And if Zane Rivera cannot handle one honest text from the woman he claims to love after everything that man has put you through,” Cassie says, with the calm certainty of someone announcing a business decision, “I will personally kick his emotionally damaged ass so hard that his cock files a formal complaint with the relevant authorities.”
A laugh breaks through my tears before I can stop it.
The phone lights up causing both of us to freeze.
My heart goes stupidly, completely still.
Cassie leans in and whispers, “Well, fuck me. That brooding garage goblin has found his way back from the emotional wilderness.”
I snatch the phone off the cushion before she can get anywhere near it.
My hands go cold around the screen. For one second, I can’t bring myself to open it. I just sit here, holding the phone, which is pathetic, and I am fully aware of that, yet I cannot seem to do anything about it.
Coward.
I hate that word. But most of all, I hate that it belongs to me right now.
I open it.
Zane:I’m sorry, Sky. Let me pick you up after work tomorrow. There’s something I need to do here with Rainer first. Then I’ll tell you everything. I promise.
I text back before I have finished thinking, my heart going too fast, the question already in my chest before it reaches my thumbs.
Skylar:Is Rainer okay?
Because Rainer is not just Zane’s person.
He’s mine too, in a quiet way I have never known how to say out loud. The man who found me drowning in grief after Zane went away, handed me an apartment, and asked for nothing. Who has never, in all the years I have known him, made me feel like I was too much or not enough or anything other than exactly who I was supposed to be.
If something has happened to him…
The typing indicator appears and a text message comes through.
Zane:Yeah. He’s okay. I’ll explain tomorrow. I love you.
I stare at those last three words for a long moment before my thumbs move.
Skylar:I love you too.
The words blur.
I blink hard and fast because I have already cried once this morning, and I have limits.
Cassie shifts beside me. “Well?”
I hand her the phone because words seem to be failing me right now.
She reads it before passing the phone back. She gets up, walks to the kitchen, picks up her cereal box, and shakes it.
“Do you want some breakfast?”
Chapter 21
Zane
Sleep refuses to come to me.
