Page 42 of Scorched Veil
She turns away, and they disappear down the path toward the dock. I hear the boat engine start. I hear it pull away from the pier, the sound getting smaller until the jungle swallows it, and then there's nothing.
Just me, the pool, the island, and the silence where she used to be.
Day one without her
I standby the pool until the sun goes down. I don’t move. I just stare at the path she walked away on, like if I look hard enough, she’ll reappear at the end of it. The same path where her sundress caught the light and her damp hair swung against her back. The path where she looked back at me one last time with those red, uncertain eyes and tore my heart out.
I told the staff to stay away, I can’t stand the sight of anyone in my space at the moment. The villa feels too big, too empty, too haunted by her. Her coffee cup is still sitting on the kitchen counter exactly where she left it. There’s a faint gloss smudge on the rim from her lips. I pick it up and press my mouth to that smudge like a desperate addict, as if I could miraculously taste her, but instead, I’m greeted by cold ceramic.
It makes the hole in my chest bigger.
I pour myself a whiskey, then another, to chase these feelings away. By the time the bottle is empty, I’m sitting on the cold marble floor with my back against the cabinets, her coffee cup still clutched in my hand like a fucking teddy bear.
This is what I’ve become. A pathetic, broken man drinking alone in the dark because the woman I obsessed over for seven years finally saw me for what I am … and walked away.
Day Two
I pullup the cameras out of habit. Every screen is empty. She’s not in the pool or the kitchen. She’s not curled up in the green chair with a book pressed to her chest. The villa feels like a corpse, cold, hollow, lifeless. Just rooms full of silence where she used to be. I keep refreshing the feeds like a pathetic junkie,praying the system is broken, praying I’ll see her walking across the lawn or reading on the lounger.
But nothing.
Her absence is louder than anything I’ve ever heard.
Andreas calls.
I don’t answer.
He calls again.
I throw the phone across the office so hard it cracks the monitor showing our bedroom, the screen fracturing like a spiderweb. Her side of the bed is still crumpled from where she slept the night before she left. The pillow still has the shape of her head. I stare at it until my eyes burn and my throat closes.
I open the whiskey.
I don’t bother with a glass. I just tilt the bottle back and drink straight from it, the burn doing nothing to fill the gaping hole in my chest.
I end up on the floor again, back against the wall, surrounded by empty bottles and shattered glass.
This is what I’ve become without her.
A pathetic, drunk, broken man sitting on the floor of his own house. I press my forehead to my knees and whisper her name into the dark like a fucking prayer.
“Summer … please, come back to me.”
But no one answers.
Day Three
I endup in the closet.
I don’t know how I got here. One minute I was on the bedroom floor, the next, I’m surrounded by her clothes. Everypiece I chose for her is still hanging in a neat row, like she’s coming back. The soft sundresses, the sheer black dress from the yacht, the red silk she wore the night I fucked her on the dining table. I pull the red dress off the hanger and press it to my face. I breathe in hard, champagne, coconut, her skin.Her.It’s fading, but it’s still there. I slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the cold floor, the dress clutched in my lap like a security blanket.
That’s when I see them.
A pair of her dirty underwear, lying in the laundry basket, the pale pink ones she wore two days ago. The ones I peeled off her before I fucked her slow on the lounger. I stare at them for a long time, like a fucking animal. Then I reach in and grab them, I bring the fabric to my face and inhale like a desperate addict. Her scent hits me, musky, sweet, intimate. The smell of her pussy and the smell of us.
My cock hardens instantly, painfully.
I hate myself. I hate how broken I am.But I don’t stop.I shove the fabric against my nose and breathe her in while I pull my cock out with my other hand. I’m already leaking. I stroke myself hard and fast, pathetic and frantic, face buried in her dirty panties like a sad, obsessed loser.
