AllFreeNovel
Share Us
With a deep sigh, she looks around the toilet before focusing on the stained sleeve of her Charlie Brown hoodie. She’s always been obsessed with the Snoopy gang. We used to sit and watch it together for hours on end. Cassie would sit on a stack of pillows, pressed up beside me with her head on my shoulder and her arm wrapped around mine.
My phone goes off in my pocket, the three vibrations alerting me that Georgina’s home. The knowledge makes my muscles tense with the need to pull my phone out and check on her. I’m about to when Cassie comes close again.
“Just a thought,” she smirks up at me, knowing exactly what she’s done.
Holding out the tissue, I extend her the peace offering. Cassie has always had a thing for looking after people. In some ways, she’s so much like Georgina. Still, when she cleans my bust-up nose, like she’s done before, I can only watch her and think about everything she said. Georgina’s words tangle with hers, and I can’t make heads or tails of what I feel.
With every breath I try to drag into my lungs, my insides burn. It doesn’t matter how quiet it is around us because my head is screaming.
Admit it to yourself.
All I can see are those fucking soulful eyes that have a way of keeping me afloat even when I’m being pulled under. Beautiful eyes that have bewitched me with their light. That glitter with the most precious tears I have ever tasted. Tears I love from eyes I adore.
I’m done begging for second place.
You either want me or you don’t.
I do. I want her. I want her more than I can bear. Georgina is the only thing that has made me relinquish my control in any way. She’s right—when I’m with her and she’s giving me every last vestige of her existence, begging me for my pain and clinging to me like I’m her buoy, nothing else matters. For that moment, I’m free of everything. Every expectation. Every hope. Every demand. All the weight that’s been thrust on me. It’s all gone.
There’s only her, and she is the only thing that matters. Now she’s gone, and the only glimpse of light I had is gone with her. All this time, she’s been my personal heaven even when I’m in perpetual hell.
My vision blurs as I suck in a lungful of air, trying to fill the hollowness, hoping that the burn somehow lights up the bleakness.
It doesn’t.
With every second that ticks by, it gets darker. Emptier.
“It’s going to be okay,” Cassie whispers as she uses her nail to scratch some of the dried blood from my chin.
At two years old, she used to tell me that on repeat. Twenty-one years later and she’s still telling me the same thing. Except this time there’s not a single dredge of comfort to be found. Every cell of my being is desperate for one thing.
“I have to go.” Lifting her to the side, I head for the door, only to stop short when I realise that Casper has the keys to my car and that he’s not going to give them to me right now. Especially not for what I’m about to do. “I need your keys.”
“My keys?”
“Your car. I—”
“Don’t ruin my baby,” she warns me, throwing me the keys to her Evoque.
The minute they’re in my hands, I peg it out of there, not stopping for anything. Not even to make good on the promise I made to the wrong girl.
Chapter 9
GEORGINA
Cooper opens my own door for me. A look of pity crosses his face when he looks back at me, watching him from the safety of the car, before he goes inside and searches the place top to bottom with another of his men. This is not what I imagined being in love would be like. Maybe I am every bit as stupid as Freddie called me out to be. Maybe I should’ve known better than to hope for something that he so clearly isn’t capable of giving, even if it’s already in his grasp.
“We’re all clear,” he tells the two other men that stayed with me in the Range when he opens my door.
The instant I’m through the threshold, I’m more lost than I’ve ever been. The door closes, and I keep searching for Chips to come greet me, to give me some of the affection that I’m so desperately after as I take the stairs up to my room so I can pack my bags for the weekend and my week at the Aviary before I go to New York. There’s nothing left here for me with the exception of empty rooms and, worst of all, memories of all the moments we spent together in this place.
All those hours we sat in my living room while I mended shoes and he watched me. All those seconds that I spent wishing he would disappear so I didn’t have to feel the things I do. Nights where we sat in the silence pretending that we couldn’t hear Arabella cry herself to sleep after the baby died.
You don’t realise how it’s all those inconsequential moments that end up meaning the most. The ones where you simply exist together. It’s not the sex or lust that makes it hard to forget someone. It’s not the heated arguments or those times where he lost control. It’s not the fireworks…it’s the quiet nights. The click of his fingers on the keys of his laptop. The clucking of his tongue when he gets into solving a problem. The tapping of his feet when he’s concentrating so hard that he doesn’t realise his breaths are lightly whistling through his teeth, the hiss a hypnotic lull that made it easy to fall asleep beside him.
He shoved himself into my life and took the silence away. It never fully dawned on me how lonely I was until he was here all the time. And now, he’s gone, and I can’t stay either. He didn’t destroy me, but his absence eventually will.
Voices trail up to my bedroom as I pack. The lump in my throat makes it impossible for me to breathe, let alone send whoever it is away. I’m too tired and too…done.
