“Jordin!” My voice echoed back at me, a hollow, pathetic sound. “Baby, I’m home. I know you’re here!” The plea cracked, revealing the boy underneath the bully. “Just… please.”
Silence. I knew she wouldn’t answer.
“Jordin. My baby, my everything.” I started to sing, a ragged, off-key fragment of a song she loved. She used to smile and would press her face into my chest when I did that. Now, the notes just died in the still air. I staggered through the rooms, flipping on lights, each one illuminating another space she’d vacated. Nothing.
Back downstairs, my eyes landed on the photo on the mantle.
I grabbed it, holding it up in the lamplight. My hand trembled. It was us on the day I proposed to her. God, she was beautiful. Radiant. She was holding my hand, looking at me like I was her whole world.
I’d loved her from the first second I saw her in that high school hallway. She walked in like she owned the place, and I, the arrogant little king, had to try and break her, mold her to fit me. I pushed, I insulted, I bullied. But she stood her ground. I gave in, took her how she was. I was glad she never crumbled under the weight I put on her.
But my insecurity festered when we got together. I felt like I was always playing catch-up. Jordin was everything I wasn’t. She was better. Better at life, better at love, just… better. Too good for me.
And that truth ate me alive. It gnawed at me day and night, this sick, gnawing fear that she’d finally see the hollow man I was. And that—right there—is how I ended up in this mess. Because I felt she didn’t need me, and I was terrified. Terrified of being left, of being nothing, of watching her walk away. She was gone all the time. Working with men better than me, younger than me.
I went in search of something to quiet that fear. A distraction. A hit of attention. Proof that I was still wanted, still a man. I went looking for validation in all the wrong places. Each time I crossed that line, it wasn’t about sex. It was about proving to myself I still mattered.
Maybe if she gave me a chance to explain why I did what I did, she’d understand I didn’t mean to hurt her.
I felt the tears coming again. The glass of the picture frame blurred. My breathing was ragged, tearing from my lungs.
“How could you?” I whispered, my voice shaking. “How could you leave me for one little mistake? We had everything. Everything.”
In that moment, I hated her for it. I hated her for being so perfect. For making me love her so much it felt like dying to lose her. For never loving me with the same desperate, clawing need.She couldn’t have, because if she did, she would have already forgiven me.
The picture frame left my hand before I could think. It flew across the room and exploded against the wall.
“Goddamn it, Jordin!” I roared.
The sound was a release that devolved. I kicked over a lamp, relishing the sound of shattering glass. I felt good. I upended the bookshelf, and I felt better. I became a storm of my own making, tearing through the home we’d built, reducing it to rubble.
When the destructive energy finally left me, I sank to the floor, my back against the kitchen cabinets. I was surrounded by the wreckage.
She wasn’t here.
And I knew, with a certainty that turned the vodka in my stomach to acid, that she wasn’t coming back.
I had no one to blame but the motherfucker sitting in the ruins. Me.
five- Ciarán
A floorboard groaned. My eyes snapped open.
The sound was wrong. It didn’t belong in the 2 a.m. silence of my house.
Nobody should have been here. This place was my sanctuary. My fortress. Nobody knew about it.
I was on the studio couch again. The room was pitch black. My hand slid under the cushion. My fingers found cold steel.
The safety clicked off with a whisper in the dark.
I pushed myself up from the sofa. Moved through the darkness, holding my breath.
The sound came again—hangers scraping. From my bedroom closet upstairs.
At the top of the stairs, I froze. My room was dark, but I could make out a shadow moving inside. My heart hammered against my ribs. Adrenaline made my hand tremble around the pistol grip.
Fight or flight kicked in.
