Total pages in book: 87
Estimated words: 84446 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 422(@200wpm)___ 338(@250wpm)___ 281(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84446 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 422(@200wpm)___ 338(@250wpm)___ 281(@300wpm)
The one that I’d been struggling to keep flickering for weeks.
And all that was left was a bottomless darkness.
Swallowing me up.
I stood there longer than my pride would let me admit.
Before I found myself turning, walking on stiff legs to the corner, each step feeling weighted and clumsy.
I could see the apartment a few blocks over, familiar, even starting to feel like home.
Inside, I would find Elian sitting there waiting for his coffee. I would have to put on a brave face and walk inside and try to act like things were okay.
When they weren’t.
God, they weren’t.
Nothing was okay.
I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t go back there.
I couldn’t look in the face of the man I loved and think about the way he’d yelled at me on the street like I was an annoying child. Not his wife. Not the woman he swore before God to have and hold.
I just couldn’t do this anymore.
Not for another goddamn second.
I tossed the drinks into the trash on the corner, then turned in the opposite direction of the apartment building, already feeling the tears threatening, pleading with them to hold out as I made my way down the subway steps, then waited on the platform with a bunch of strangers I didn’t want to see me cry.
I deep breathed through the sorrow as I rode one subway, then transferred to another.
I even kept it together as I hopped in a cab and gave them an address. To the only place I could think of to go.
But as I walked up to the familiar building, as I rode the elevator to his floor, as I walked up to his door, as I knocked, I felt my defenses crumbling, felt every hurt feeling and disappointment well up and spill over.
As my tears started to do the same, I heard the doorknob turning.
Saw the door opening.
And there he was.
Nico.
“Lore.” He exhaled out my name like a breath he’d been holding for weeks. “What—“ he started as a sob escaped me. “Oh, honey,” he said, reaching for me, and drawing me close to his wide, reassuring chest.
He pulled me inside, kicking the door closed, then just stood there in the entryway, holding me, his arms a hug I’d been aching for without realizing it.
“Lore, honey,” he said, sounding as hopeless as the situation I found myself in. “If he hurt you—“ he said, trailing off, the threat hanging in the air between us.
He had.
Hurt me.
More than I knew was possible so quickly.
But that wasn’t what Nico thought, what he was worried about. The tension was growing in his body with each passing second, imagining me on the ground after my husband struck me.
I sniffled hard, trying to get it together.
When the words escaped me, though, they were pulled apart at the edges.
“I just want him to love me back. Why can’t he just love me back?”
“Oh, Lore,” Nico said, arms squeezing me tighter, crushing my breath in my chest, but I clung to him harder still, sure if I let go, I would shatter to pieces.
Nico pulled me blindly across the apartment, my face buried in his chest, then lowered us down onto the couch, holding me with my legs over his lap like he did that time on the anniversary of our mothers’ passing, when the grief shook my fault line bones, leaving me sobbing on the floor. Where he’d scooped me up, brought me to the couch, and just let the pain leech from me as he sat there with me.
He didn’t try to feed me reassurances, try to tell me it was going to be okay.
I wouldn’t have believed him anyway.
And maybe he sensed that.
He just sat there, being the rock he’d always been for me. Steady and stalwart. Unbreakable, even as I broke apart.
I couldn’t tell you how long we sat there like that. As the sobs rose from somewhere deep inside of me, the intensity of them rocking my body as the tears burned down my cheeks, soaked through Nico’s shirt.
“No one,” Nico finally said as my sobs became sniffles, as enough of the pain escaped to make it possible to think past it, “And I mean no fucking one,” he went on, “is ever fucking worth crying like that over.”
“You don’t—“
“I know I don’t understand,” he cut me off, voice a little softer, a bit sadder. The words were hanging there in the air. Because you wouldn’t talk to me. “But I don’t need to understand to know that pain like that isn’t right. That anyone who causes that isn’t someone deserving of how much you clearly care.”
“I’ve tried so hard,” I said, blinking back more tears.
“Tried what?”
To stick it out? To keep enduring? To convince myself that it was going to get better even when there were no signs of that.
“Tried to wait,” I said finally.