If Only (GxG)

Chapter 58 Inbetween

A/N
🎶Brooklyn Baby by Lana Del Rey🎶

『 °*• ❀ •*°』
Alison's POV

The first few days are hell.

Not the screaming kind. Not the dramatic, throw-the-pillow, rage-at-the-sky kind.

It's quieter than that.

It's the kind of hell that seeps into the walls and settles into the silence, the kind that follows me from room to room no matter how hard I try to escape it.

I don't eat. Not because I'm trying to punish myself or because there's some tragic vow of heartbreak in it. I just forget. The hunger is there, faint and buried, but it sits too far below the static to reach. My body feels heavy and uncoordinated, like I'm walking through water. Every movement is slow, automatic, stripped of purpose.

The only thing I manage with any consistency is to cry. Even that runs out eventually, until my eyes ache and my head throbs and nothing comes out anymore.

Sometimes I replay what I said to her. Every word. Every breath. I walk back over the sentences like they're scattered glass, wondering which one cut too deep, which one made her leave for good. I start to second-guess everything. Was I too loud, too desperate, too unwilling to let her go? I cling to the memory of her face, the tiny flinch I thought I saw, the tear that didn't fall. Maybe it meant something. Maybe she regretted it.

I try to text her. Once. Twice. Then again, a full message this time, not just her name. I try to call. The line doesn't even ring. It cuts off before the first sound. I stare at my screen, numb and blinking, until it clicks.

She changed her number.

The realisation doesn't come with noise. It lands with silence, heavy and unrelenting. A kind of finality that wraps cold fingers around my throat and doesn't let go. I feel it settle into the room with me, vast and yawning like a chasm. Blake's absence is no longer just a silence. It is a void. It is the sound of something permanent.

And still, I try again. A message to her old number. A voicemail I know she'll never hear. Something in me refuses to believe she could disappear so completely. That someone who once knew every corner of me could now live in a world where I no longer exist.

But each time I reach for her, the emptiness answers back.

And I am left with it.

I try to sleep, and I really do try, but every time my eyes close I see her. Not the woman who pressed me against her bookcase and kissed me until my legs shook, or who left me little handwritten notes beside steaming cups of coffee. Those memories come first, but they fade, and then the other version takes their place. The one who stood in the park and told me she didn't want me anymore. The one who said my name like it was a farewell.

It replays endlessly, a loop I can't break. Her voice, her shrug, the way she gestured towards the gate where George was waiting. All of it fixed in place, as if it's been branded into the back of my eyelids.

I lie awake for hours, staring at ceilings and walls and the inside of my pillowcase, trying to think of anything else, trying not to feel, and failing every time.

People try to help. George brings me tea. Ivy makes soup I never touch. Olivia sits quietly beside me, her hand folded gently over mine, and Ron offers to beat someone up at least once an hour as though sheer force could set things right.

I nod. I thank them. I let them believe I'm holding together when I feel like I'm splintering further apart with every passing minute.

How do you explain this kind of grief?