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26 year old, Connor Deluca, is a professional Hockey player in the NHL; who just moved into the expensive Citrus Grove Community.
23 year old, Serena Jade, is the recluse famous author known to the public only under her pen name Skylyn Voss, and...
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The world felt completely still underneath the floccose weight of her blanket. She had remained tucked into her room, scared to leave the delicate threshold of her safe walls because the world now became a battlefield for her. Things had gotten bad. She wasn't sleeping properly, too scared someone would show up at her house. She wasn't eating right, not trusting her delivery service anymore. She had shut her life off nearly completely while the world tried desperately to peer into her life.
Nothing truly felt good anymore. She closed all her blinds, kept herself off the internet so she wouldn't see her face plastered all over it, and stopped answering calls.
The only glimmer of light she got was from memories that were followed up with a sharp stab of pain every time she indulged in them. Memories of him, but the more she thought of their time together, the more she was reminded of how royally messed up it all was now. She felt the weight of her actions a lot more than anything he had done.
She constantly replayed what she had said in the heat of her panicked anger, wishing she could be different. But Serena was wired to fear, to question, and accuse, so maybe she could succeed at protecting herself the second time around.
She had done that; she succeeded in avoiding every signal of danger that might ever cross her path. In doing so, she pushed away every person before they even got a chance to get close. One did get close even despite all of her intricately crafted safety measures, he got so perfectly close that Serena's heart had leaped out of the old wounds in her chest and crawled to him desperately. She pushed that one away too, in her frantic attempt to keep the heart that no longer belonged to her safe.
She didn't know what to believe, but the sheer conviction and hurt she had seen on Connor's face left her feeling crowed with a sense of dread that she had a more significant hand in this. She felt sick with the idea that her past trauma had caused her to react with the same ferocity as the people who had given it to her.
She lay in bed with eyes bloodshot and hung down by heavy bags, staring ahead at a spot on the wall while her mind did heavy blows to herself. She wasn't worth love and was too damaged to receive or give it. Like it was her own form of personal torment, she replayed and replayed his harsh words, words that were true.
The worst part of her lonely wallowing was the two sides of herself tearing her heart in two directions. The part that felt utterly certain of her assumptions and betrayal by Connor. It was the part that hung on to the notion he was the one that outed her to the world, the part that focused on him looking through her computer instead of looking for her, and all of the words he used to hurt her.
Then there was the side that remembered his touch, his voice, and the way he made the world look not so scary. She could painfully recall every detail of his warm whispered words sliding right through the damaged walls of her heart, cradling it in the palms of his sincerity. She was crushed she would never have that again, and every sense in her body screamed out for him in hopes he'd hear.
