Jade
I kept glancing over my shoulder, convinced I wasn’t alone. I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was there, lurking just out of sight, their presence brushing against the edges of my senses like cold fingers trailing across my spine. I tightened my jacket around myself and walked faster, my heartbeat pounding a frantic rhythm against my ribs.
When I finally stumbled through the door and locked it behind me, I sagged against it, breathing hard, my body trembling from more than just the cold. I told myself it was nothing — just nerves, just my imagination running wild in the gathering dark — but deep down, I knew better. Someone had been following me. And worse, I knew Zade would have felt it too if the bond between us hadn’t frayed so thin it barely hummed at all anymore.
I found him in the kitchen, his back to me as he leaned over the counter, a glass clutched tightly in his hand. His shoulders were tense, his whole body radiating a cold, brittle anger that had nothing to do with me being late and everything to do with whatever storm was raging inside him that he refused to share.
“Someone was following me,” I said quietly, my voice barely louder than the ticking of the old clock on the wall. “I swear, Zade, I felt it—”
“You’re fine,” he snapped without turning around, his voice sharp enough to make me flinch. “You made it back, didn’t you?”
The words hit harder than they should have, knocking the air from my lungs. I stared at his rigid frame, waiting for him to soften, to apologize, to be the Zade who once wrapped me up so tightly I thought nothing in the world could ever touch me. But he stayed where he was, a wall I couldn’t scale, a door that wouldn’t open no matter how hard I pounded on it.
Something inside me cracked then, a thin, splintering sound that echoed louder than any shout ever could. I stepped forward, my hands shaking, my throat tight. “What’s going on with you?” I demanded, my voice raw with everything I had tried so hard to swallow down. “You’re not… you’re not here anymore. You’re not with me.”
Finally, he turned. His face was a mask of exhaustion and something uglier, something colder. “Maybe I was never with you,” he said, and though his tone was flat, the words burned like acid.
I stumbled back a step, as if he had physically struck me. “You don’t mean that,” I whispered, desperately clinging to the fragile pieces of hope left between us. “Zade, please—”
“I do,” he said, cutting me off with a brutal finality. His dark eyes didn’t soften, didn’t flicker. “You were a mistake. I never wanted this. I never wanted you.”
The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the faint creak of the floorboards under my trembling feet. I stared at him, at the boy I loved, at the boy who had once fought the world just to hold my hand, and I realized he wasn’t there anymore. Maybe he had never been. Maybe I had been chasing a dream that had never belonged to me in the first place.
My vision blurred, the room swimming in and out of focus as the tears finally broke free. I turned before he could see them fall, before he could see how thoroughly he had shattered me. I grabbed my bag with shaking hands, barely able to see the zipper as I shoved my things inside.
“Don’t,” he said from behind me, his voice rough but still impossibly distant. “Don’t make this harder.”
I almost laughed. The sound that slipped out of me was wet and broken and nothing like laughter. “You already made it hard,” I said, choking on the words. “You made it impossible.”
I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t look back. I walked out the door and down the steps and into the night that had once felt so full of promise but now pressed down around me like a grave.
Behind me, through the blur of my tears, I thought I heard the door creak again, thought I felt his eyes burning into my back. But he didn’t call out. He didn’t chase me. He let me go, the same way he had been letting me go for days now, piece by piece until there was nothing left to hold onto.
As I disappeared into the trees, my heart shattered into pieces so small I knew I would never be able to gather them all again.
And Zade — the boy who had once sworn he would never let me fall — stood in the doorway and watched me break without lifting a hand to stop it.