Total pages in book: 191
Estimated words: 188966 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 945(@200wpm)___ 756(@250wpm)___ 630(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 188966 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 945(@200wpm)___ 756(@250wpm)___ 630(@300wpm)
I assumed she was fucking him.
I assumed she was in love with him.
I assumed she was over whatever infatuation she had with me.
I assumed she no longer cared.
I couldn’t blame her for moving on after what I’d texted her that night.
I couldn’t hate her for fucking someone else, all while I physically couldn’t.
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t tried.
The day she brought Joel around, laughing at his jokes and holding his hand on the couch, something had snapped inside me that’d remained fractured ever since.
That night, as I skulked in the shadows and watched her kiss him goodbye, my heart wrenched from my chest, sickness splashed on my tongue, and I stumbled to my bedroom so drunkenly, so brokenly, that I’d slammed the door so hard, the latch didn’t catch, and it shot wide open, hammering against the siding, announcing to anyone who heard that I couldn’t fucking deal with the pain inside me.
I’d been so naïve.
So idiotic not to have seen how much Neri’s affection meant to me.
I’d lost everyone who ever loved me.
I’d grown so used to Neri’s assurances that she was mine even if I couldn’t have her.
But now, I’d pushed away the one girl who cared. The one girl who actually wanted me and she left me spiralling into blackness, coming face-to-face with the nightmare that I’d done this.
I’d pushed her away, and now...she’d given me up.
I’d felt more alone that night than I had the day Neri found me and told me I was the only survivor.
I’d leaned on her too much.
I’d fallen for her too hard.
I’d fucked everything up and now the one place I was safe had become the one place I couldn’t survive.
Once Joel left that night, I’d waited for Neri to come to me.
I trembled on my bed, doing my best to restrain myself, all while knowing that the moment she stepped foot in my room, I wouldn’t be able to stop.
Not anymore.
I would’ve shoved her against the door and stuck my tongue down her throat, doing my best to replace that bastard’s spit with my own, proving to her that a kiss from him was nothing compared to a kiss from me.
But she never came.
She hadn’t visited me in the fourteen torturous months she was his.
And the morning I caught her popping a contraceptive pill before going out on The Fluke as a family, I’d known she was letting him inside her. He was coming inside her. He was touching her and kissing her and driving his fucking cock between her legs and—
Fuck, stop.
I’d hoped, after a year, that I would’ve begun the climb out of this sea of depression. That I could finally grab onto the shards of happiness that she’d once given me. She’d been my light while I floundered in the grief of losing my family. She’d been my smiles and laughter and hope.
And without her?
I forgot how to do any of that.
I acted around the Taylors.
I made sure to pull my weight and bent over backward for what they wanted, but my heart was dead. A useless piece of meat inside me, rotten and unwanted.
There was nothing for me here.
There was nothing for me back home.
I couldn’t stay, but I couldn’t go.
I was trapped and lost and hurting and so fucking sad that eventually, I would suffocate.
I longed for that day.
The day when I could just give in, give up, let go.
I fantasised about sinking beneath the waves that’d stolen everything and never coming back up.
And I hated myself because I wasn’t that weak.
I wasn’t supposed to be this way.
My father would have cuffed me around the head for a single notion of not coping.
But that was what Neri had done to me.
That was what not dealing with four years of grief had done.
That was what being stranded on a land that wasn’t mine, existing with people who weren’t mine, and longing after a life that could never be mine had done.
I supposed a therapist would call me depressed.
They’d say I’d reached critical burnout from refusing to deal with my past.
But...what was the fucking point?
How was I supposed to be happy when I was one phone call away from being deported and killed? How was I supposed to find joy when my dead heart remained so stubbornly loyal to those it’d lost? How was I supposed to chase after what I wanted, to build a life I desperately needed when it could all be taken away so easily?
Neri had no idea, but I’d installed a hook-up app on the phone she’d given me, desperate to find relief. The first few times the app matched me with someone, my chest tightened with hope that perhaps this time, I might be man enough to lose my virginity.
I might be lucky enough to find comfort in the arms of a total stranger.