Page 106 of Slashed Bonds

The last men who loved me knew everything.

They’d been there for all of it. They had every dream I ever said out loud in a notebook somewhere, and they used the notebook.

And in the end, they planned and executed my downfall.

These three know nothing.

They haven’t asked, and they’ve been treating me like something worth keeping anyway.

Is it more frightening because I can easily be discarded? Easily becomes strangers with a simple snap of one’s fingers?

It’s scary because I’d actually dare to care…

But somewhere deep within, I feel like they don’t yearn to erase me…

Hell…I dare to hope I stick around.

“And the train wreck begins,” Maddie hums.

I glance up.

And she’s looking at me with a softened smile.

Not the grin. Not the fault-finder. Something quieter, and there’s an odd pride in it that I don’t know what to do with.

“What?”

My cheeks are heating.

I can feel it starting and I can’t stop it, and I’d like to note that I’ve blushed more in this house in six days than I did in the five years before it.

“You look like you’re enjoying yourself.”

She says it quietly. Like a secret.

Like the words might break if she said them at volume.

“It’s been years since I’ve seen a glimpse of you being happy, Malice.”

A tease in it, on the surface. Underneath, she means every syllable.

“Good for you.”

I swallow.

The lump’s there. It’s always there. I look away, out the wall of windows at the pines, because I don’t do this. I don’t do emotional shit.

Emotional shit is how a girl ends up eighteen and pregnant on a loading dock.

It’s exactly how a girl ends up believing four boys with good teeth when they say forever.

And I sadly learned the hard way of what I know about forever.

It has paperwork. It gets finalized three weeks before anyone tells you, and it gets said out loud in a boardroom voice while a woman checks her watch.

I’ve been slashed once. I know what the blade looks like coming.

So the thing I’m doing on this couch, with this notebook, in this house, is standing at the edge of a sheet of ice I’ve already gone through once, testing it with one boot, and pretending to myself that I haven’t already decided to step out.