First version:I love you and I’m sorry and please don’t forget me and this is killing me and
Too much. Too desperate. Too true.
Second version:Had to go. You were great. Thanks for the orgasms and emotional stability.
Too flippant. Like I’m leaving a Yelp review for dick that changed my life.
Third version:I didn’t choose to leave. You were real. We were real. I’m sorry. - S
Still not enough. Will never be enough. But it’s all I have.
I set it next to the cookies and walk away before I add a PS that saysI would’ve married you in a gas station if you’d asked.
Beth Taylor’s ghost will live here until someone else moves in. Until another person fills these rooms and never knows that a woman named Stevie once stood in this kitchen wearing her lover’s shirt, falling in love with men she couldn’t keep.
Saul waits by the door.
I take one last look. The counter where Enzo burned eggs. The couch where we watched movies. The chair where his jacket lived.
The mug is in my bag. The blanket. Dario’s things. Everything I could carry of the life I almost had.
“Ready?” Saul asks.
No. “Yes.”
I walk out the door. Lock it behind me.
Beth Taylor doesn’t live here anymore. And Stevie Reeves is disappearing.
Again.
The car is quiet.
Saul drives. I sit in the passenger seat with my fingers wrapped in the fabric of Enzo’s shirt, trying not to think about him walking into that apartment tonight. Finding the cookies. Reading the note.
Trying not to imagine his face.
He’ll think I ran. That I couldn’t handle it. That I’m the same flighty disaster who broke into a house wearing his boss’s cologne.
He won’t know I fought. That I begged Saul to let me stay. That I would’ve risked everything just for one more morning of burnt eggs and bad coffee.
He’ll never know I was falling in love with him.
Past tense now.
Grief is just love with nowhere to go.
And I’ve got enough love for two crime family members and a U.S. Marshal, apparently, because my heart is an overachieving slut with no sense of self-preservation.
The city shrinks in the rearview mirror.
Toward Colorado. Toward Zoey Carter. Toward a blue door and a bakery and a life I might want to live.
Even if every cookie I bake for the rest of my life tastes like grief.
I close my eyes.
Press Enzo’s shirt against my chest. And try to hold onto the feeling of being seen.
