Angsty - Enemies to Lovers - Slow Burn
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Hitch Pepper might've had a stupid name, and a personality that drove me crazy, but that didn't stop her from being gorgeous. Everyone knew it, guys and girls alike.
And my buddy Phil Childre...
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A BROKEN HEART is very similar to mourning a loved one. The pain never lessens, but you get better at managing it.
Come August, I still felt awful. I ached every day and missed her with every breath in me. And I saw her in everything.
The sun's rays splashing across my work desk. The smell of rain. The taste of sugar and the sound of music.
She was everywhere. I couldn't get rid of her even if I tried.
And I did try. I rearranged my room because it hurt too much to open the door to my en-suite and come face to face with a bed that should have Hitch in it. I put the furniture in the living room back where it was before Hitch had moved in and changed the layout. Did the same with the pantry, too. Made the house look like Hitch had never been there.
But that's the thing about ghosts. They're still there even if their surroundings change. And the memory of Hitch was always there, haunting me.
I suppose I deserved it because I did some haunting of my own.
I continued going out every weekend in hopes of seeing her. The weekends had quickly become the only thing I looked forward to because that was when I got the chance to see Hitch.
I had only seen her twice since that first time. In both instances, I had been lucky enough that she hadn't seen me, though I was sure that she wasn't seeing much of anything at all.
She was barely lucid each time, eyes half-lidded and lips fumbling her words. She was usually anchored at Byron's side with his heavy arm around her shoulders.
It killed me to see her like that. Restrained and controlled. It wasn't like her at all. She was a free spirit. A wild child. She marched to the beat of her own drum and didn't let anyone tell her otherwise.
Why was she letting him kill her fire?
Her fire was practically snuffed out when I found her with Byron at another rich kid's house. They were in a conversation pit with kids doing lines of coke on the table in front of them.
Hitch was slumped against Byron, mouth parted and neck bent at an awkward angle. I wasn't alarmed at first, so happy to have found her that I found a place out of view to keep an eye on her and just breathed. Long, deep breaths. The relieved kind.
I could only ever breathe properly when I saw with my own eyes that she was alive and well.
As I continued to watch her, however, I began to question if she was either of the two adjectives, however. She didn't move a muscle for twenty straight minutes and flopped over without moving when Byron murmured something to her and then got up to get another beer.
I began to panic as she lay there, unmoving, and soon crossed the distance to kneel in front of her, brushing back her hair from her face and shaking her.
