Page 71 of Before You Fell

Willow: I’m coming home tonight.

His reply comes through almost straight away.

Dad: Good. We’ll be here. Drive safe, sweetheart.

By the time I get back to my apartment, something inside me has gone cold in a way that feels almost clean. I pull my suitcase from the wardrobe and set it on the bed. Clothes go in first. Jeans, shirts, underwear, a pair of boots. I don’t bother to fold them neatly because I am not packing a life with care. I’m stripping one down to what I can carry.

My notebook sits on the bedside table, its black cover worn soft at the corners from years of being dragged through airports, studios, buses, green rooms, and every place I convinced myself was home because Phoenix was there.

I pick it up and, for a second, my hand tightens around it. Then I pack it up, too.

My phone lights up again.

Phoenix.

I decline his call before I block him. Delete him. Two quick taps and all those years sit there with nowhere left to go.

I open Damon’s name next and type.

Willow: I’m fucking done. Find some other writer to boss around.

I send it before some exhausted part of my brain tells me to stay. Then I block and delete his name, too, because I know Damon. One reply from him, one hard little lecture about contracts and schedules, and he’ll try to make my leaving sound selfish.

Dad told me to come home and that is exactly what I’m going to do.

I take one last glance around the apartment, and it already feels as if it belongs to someone I no longer want to be anymore.

I pull the door open and step into the hallway, my suitcase trailing beside me. The wheels sound too loud on the floor, but I keep walking. I don’t look back at the apartment because some places stop being home before you are ready to leave them.

The elevator doors slide open and I step in. As the elevator descends to the underground parking level, my phone lights up with a message from Jax.

I don’t open it.

The doors part.

I load my suitcase into the trunk of my car, slide in behind the wheel, and start the engine. When I drive up the ramp and the building disappears in the rear-view mirror, I don’t bother to look back.

I am done with this life and everything it has taken from me. But more importantly, I am fucking done with Phoenix Stone.

Chapter Twelve

Phoenix

Idon’t sleep, which is not unusual for me. Sleep and I have never been in a committed relationship. I get it when my body finally taps out, when the drugs turn the lights off, or when I have fucked some woman hard enough that a hotel mattress and a few hours of blackout start to appear close behind it.

Then morning comes and the world wants another piece of me.

But this is different. This is me lying in bed, phone in hand, staring at a screen that keeps proving the same ugly little fact. Willow has shut me out.

I stare at the texts I have sent her.

Phoenix: Wills, answer your phone.

Phoenix: You don’t get to disappear after looking at me like that.

Phoenix: Let me explain.

Phoenix: I know what it looked like.