It’s been his thing ever since I told him I’m not going to play pretend with him just because the paperwork says wife. This marriage isn’t fate. It’s a mistake. But he still looks at me like I meanmore. Like one emotional night in Vegas somehow turned us into something real. It didn’t.
This isn’t a love story. It’s a glitch. A drunk detour neither of us planned for. One day we’ll both look back and laugh at how reckless it was. How easy it is to mistake comfort for connection when you’re too inebriated to tell the difference.
But seriously, why does he have to be so pretty? Unfairly pretty. This man’s face turns logic into noise. Sharp jaw, those ridiculous lips, and a body that looks like it was designed to ruin lives. One glance and everything I’ve planned—every carefully built reason to stay away—starts to fall apart.
Instead of having a real conversation like a grown adult, he’s been sulking. Acting like I broke his heart. He’s covered in new tattoos I never saw coming and he’s always playing broody Italian music that is beginning to grate on my nerves.
I asked Eslin if the constant tattooing was a real emotional coping mechanism or just Declan being extra. She gave me her therapist voice and said, “It’s not our job to police how someone chooses to process pain.”
Great. But I’m the one dodging landmines while he turns himself into a moody mural. How many tattoos does one man need before he figures out how to say,I want youwithout bleeding it into his skin?
“It’s a mandatory team event,” I remind him. The same team that has been growing increasingly concerned about hisinkinghabit.
“I don’t celebrate Halloween. I thought this was the land of inclusivity or whatever. My body. My choice.”
I scoff. “It’s the land of legally binding contracts, you dick. And attending team functions is part of yours.”
And this. Our other norm. Fighting. We can’t be within ten feet of each other for more than ten minutes without it spiraling into round seventeen of the same damn argument. Me calling him out for not doing what he’s contractually obligated to do for the Strikers, and him firing right back that I’m not exactly holding upmyend of a certain contract either.
He doesn’t just want me living here full-time. He wants theothermarriage stuff. The touching. The kissing. The kind of earth-shattering and unholy lovemaking that feels too honest to fake. Intimacy that turns lines into dust and makes me forget I ever drew them.
Everything I felt in Vegas. Everything I swore would stay there.
The second I let Declan in, it’s not just my self-respect I’m gambling—it’s the fragile grip I have on who I am without someone to anchor me. I know what it feels like to love something so fiercely, so completely, only to have it ripped away before I could understand what life looked like without it. That kind of loss rewires you. And maybe it’s something I should be unpacking in therapy, but the truth is, I can’t risk loving something else that could disappear. Not when I’m still haunted by the one person who did.
Still, here we are. Trapped in this push-pull purgatory, stuck trading jabs in a game where no one wins and both of us leave pissed off and unsatisfied. I can feel it happening in this moment.The tension building, the silence thickening, that sharp little tilt of his jaw he gets right before he calls me out for keeping him at arm’s length. We’re circling the same argument again, about to fall into it like muscle memory.
I don’t know if it’s the pressure from work or just being too close to him for too long, but I can’t tell what I want more—proving I’m right, or giving in to how badly he wants me. Lately, the need to win feels less important than the way he looks at me, like losing to him wouldn’t really be losing at all.
I don’t need this right now. I can’t want him.
I storm into the kitchen, heels clicking across the tile like gunshots. The fridge door flings open with more drama than necessary, because I’m annoyed and hot and slightly hormonally unhinged. My hand skims the shelves, and when I don’t see that familiar row of silver cans staring back at me, I nearly lose it.
“And where the hell are my diet sodas?” I yell, head halfway in the fridge like I’m expecting them to magically appear.
“They’re gone,” Declan says coolly from behind me.
I freeze. “Excuse me?”
“I threw them out.” He says it like it’s a line item on a grocery list and not a full-blown declaration of war. “They’re trash. Artificial sweeteners, zero nutrients, and they make you crash. I replaced them with organic juices. Natural energy. Pineapple-ginger, beetroot, the good stuff.”
I turn slowly, stare at him like he’s lost his Italian mind. “You threw awaymydiet sodas.”
I don’t consider myself to have an addictive personality. I’m type-A, structured to a fault. Control is how I survive. But when it comes to my diet sodas? The ones I’ve been drinking since I was sixteen? Control, couth and all decorum goes out the window. I will end a fucking life.
I keep them everywhere I know I’ll be—my apartment, my car, my office, my dad’s house—strategically stashed like survival gear. It’s one of the only non-negotiables I gave his house staff which was to always keep them stocked. But this fucker, my husband, he didn’t just cross the line. He bulldozed it, torched the remains, and dared me to say something.
He nods. Shrugs. “You’ll thank me eventually when you’ve got more energy than you know what to do with. Maybe more energy for your husband.”
I don’t speak. I reach into the fridge, grab the first thing I see—a lone tomato—and hurl it straight at his arrogant head. It hits him in the collarbone, bursts like a popped pimple.
“I see you still haven’t improved your aim.”
“What the hell iswrongwith you?”
He wipes the splatter off his chest, unimpressed. “If you wanted to lick food off of me, Americana, I prefer chocolate syrup. Whipped cream, maybe?”
“You’re unbelievable.”
