Page 54 of Ghosted

Our coach is already going to be pissed if I show up half-dead again. He loves acting like early-morning laps are discipline and not just punishment with lane lines. Count the tiles. Hold my breath. Push off the wall. Keep moving until everything ugly shuts up.

Usually, it works.

Tonight, I know it won’t, because water doesn’t wash certain things off.

It remembers.

It holds.

It gets into the cracks and stays there.

So I walk until the cold settles into my skin and Johnny’s voice stops replaying in my head.

It doesn’t.

She’s fun.

His hand near her camera.

His mouth saying pretty thing like he had any fucking right.

I tell myself it isn’t jealousy because jealousy is pathetic, and I barely know Alice. She’s a girl with a camera, a sharp mouth, and the very unfortunate ability to make my brain quiet and loud at the same fucking time.

That’s all.

Except every time I picture Johnny standing beside her chair, the lie gets harder to hold.

Johnny doesn’t want her like I do.

That’s the real problem.

He wants the chase. The game. The moment Alice realizes the room has changed and he’s the one holding the door shut. He wants to touch the thing I’m trying not to reach for just to see if I’ll bleed over it.

And maybe I will.

Maybe that’s what scares me.

Not Johnny.

Me.

Because Johnny likes ruining things, and I like keeping them.

But once I keep something, I don’t know how to let go without leaving claw marks.

My sleeve rides up when I shove my hands deeper into my hoodie pocket, and the streetlight catches the black ink on my forearm.

Cancer.

Two curved marks inked into my skin like a warning I paid someone to carve there. Simple. Black. Permanent. The kind of thing people mistake for astrology until they get close enough to understand it’s more like a fucking confession.

They call Cancer loyal. Protective. Emotional.

Like those things are harmless.

But they’re not.

Loyalty turns mean when someone threatens what matters. Protection gets ugly when the thing you’re protecting starts feeling like yours. And emotion? Fuck emotion. Emotion is just violence that hasn’t picked a direction yet.