Page 83 of Ruin
A building with one wall removed, still standing but leaning in a way that can't hold.
I set the phone face-down on the comforter.
The screen glows through the fabric for a moment, then dims.
The apartment is quiet.
The kind of quiet that isn't really quiet but the absence of a specific sound.
His voice. His footsteps.
The clink of ice cubes against crystal.
The particular silence he carries with him that isn't empty but full, pressurized, the silence of a man who chooses every word and makes the spaces between them feel deliberate.
I've been living in that silence for so long that actual quiet feels wrong.
Hollow. Like a room with all the furniture removed.
I pull the sweater down and look at the collar in the bedroom mirror.
The one that isn't cracked.
The diamonds catch the light and throw tiny fragments across my face, and I think about Emilia's engagement ring, how she keeps twisting it because it's new and foreign and she hasn't learned the weight of it yet.
I've been wearing mine for over a year.
I know its weight the way I know my own name, and I can't take it off.
I pick up the phone again and hold it against my chest.
The screen is warm from the missed calls, or maybe that's just my imagination turning everything he touches into heat.
All those calls.
I lie back on the bed and hold the phone over my heart and hate myself for how much I want it to ring again.
12
CASSIUS
Seven fucking days.
Seven days since she held a gun to my chest and I told her the truth about who I am.
About what I did.
About every carefully constructed lie that held us together like sutures in a wound that was never going to heal clean.
Seven days, and I haven't slept more than forty minutes at a time.
The penthouse feels wrong without her.
Too much space. Too much silence of the wrong kind.
The kind that's empty instead of full, the kind that exists because something's been subtracted rather than chosen.
I pour whiskey at midnight and stand at the windows watching the city breathe, and the glass reflects a man I barely recognize.
