AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I knew this but stayed anyway.
I hurt him.
He’ll never trust me again.
I don’t even trust myself.
He’s better off without me.
I have to let him go.
I have to stay away this time.
* * *
MAGNUS
He’s here. I can feel him in my apartment. He haunts the spaces like a ghost. He left me three days ago, and I haven’t seen him since, but I can still feel his presence.
It’s been the longest three days of my life. I’ve moved through the five stages of grief a hundred times since he disappeared. I’m currently back in the depression stage.
My phone rings, and I see that it’s my mom texting. I don’t even read it. Just delete her message and set my phone back down.
They can all go to hell. I have nothing to say to them. All of them have tried to reach out, but I don’t need their shit. If I never see them again, I’m fine with that. Sem was my home, and now it’s all crumbled to dust because they couldn’t just mind their own fucking business.
“Hey,” Colin says, tapping his hand on the table, bringing me back to the present. “Are you okay? I can come back another time. You don’t seem…you just seem like you’re not okay.”
He glances at the yellowing bruise on my cheek, and I rub at it. It stopped throbbing yesterday, but it’s a sad reminder that he’s gone every time I look at it. I wish it would just disappear already.
I huff out a breath and rub at my tired eyes. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m not really in the mood to work. My mind’s a mess.”
Colin reaches over and squeezes my hand. “You haven’t heard from him?”
“No,” I whisper. “I tried calling his phone a million times but it just goes to voicemail. I drove to his lot but the RV is gone…” Ugh, I run my hands roughly through my hair and blink away the tears. “He never thought he was good enough for me. I think this tipped him over the edge. I don’t think he’s ever coming back. His brother said he’s in Colorado.”
Colin removes his hand from mine and rubs a hand over his jaw. “Shit. But he loves you, right?”
My chest clenches, and I rub at it. “We never…we never talked about that.”
Colin’s gaze meets mine and he leans a little closer to me. “Hey, just because you never spoke the words doesn’t make them untrue. Just from watching you two in the same space a few times, I could see that he adored you. His eyes were always on you. He couldn’t look away.”
A sharp pain moves across my abdomen, and I close my eyes through its pain. “I thought so too, but he also left me…so there’s that. You don’t leave the person you love.”
I think about the stack of papers left on my kitchen table three days ago. The drawings of me. I’d slept fitfully that night, tossing and turning. Then I’d heard it, the snick of the door, the soft shuffling of feet, but I’d moved too slowly. He was gone by the time I’d run into the living room. The papers scattered across the hard surface, mocking me. He never wanted to part with them, and yet there they were.
It was a sickening symbolic gesture.
And I hated him a little for it.
No matter what Colin says, no matter how much Sem adored me, he won’t be coming back.
“Can I offer you some advice? From past experiences….”
I nod and stare into his kind eyes.
“Sometimes, you shouldn’t wait for something to happen. Life’s too short.”
I raise an eyebrow at him and tilt my head. “That’s cryptic. Care to expand?”
