VIPER || Oscar Piastri

Chapter 146

For the best experience, please listen to:

- O Children by Nick Cave

all songs I recommend can be found on my Viper playlist (which some of u asked for) which is on my announcement board!
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So that's it, then.

I think I just lost her for the last time.

The room didn't sound like anything real —
The extractor fan muttering in the kitchen like an old argument. The headlights streaking through the blinds made him picture her leaving. The radiator was ticking as if it was counting the amount of time she'd been gone for.

The suitcase tracks on the carpet were still there — faint, two parallel lines leading dead towards the door.

Her last mark. He stared at them so long they started to look like train tracks, as if she'd left by some railway that only ran one way, never to come back.

He closed his eyes, but that didn't help. He could still see it — her hand on the handle, the slight shake in her shoulders, the way she inhaled before she turned to him.

He opened them again, but the room didn't change.

For a while, he just stared at the door. Like it might undo itself. Like it might swing open again, and she'd be standing there, breathless, saying she changed her mind, and made a mistake — like she had done that night in Monaco.

'I didn't go,' she'd said.

'I didn't go.'

...So was she really going, this time?

Oscar didn't know.

He just looked at the door, blank and harmless.

Because it was just a door. And it didn't get to choose whether or not it let her out. It's hinges held onto nothing but wood— and at the very least, her.

He thought about her on the other side. Maybe she was crying. Maybe she wasn't. Maybe she was just standing there, breathing hard, trying to convince herself she'd done the right thing. He wondered if she'd stopped yet. If she'd looked back once, just to make sure he hadn't come get her. He pictured her standing on the pavement, her face tilted upward, the wind catching strands of her hair and dragging them across her mouth. Maybe she was thinking about coming back. Maybe she wasn't thinking about it at all.

The same hands that had held her face, the ones that used to know where she was in the dark, were now shaking and hanging uselessly at his sides.

And he kept hearing it. Over and over.

The sound of her voice. The small pause before...

bye, Oscar.

He kept thinking about the way she looked when she said it — how calm she'd seemed, how distant. It was almost kind, the way she said it. But it couldn't have been. Nobody can make a goodbye seem kind.

He tried to remember her angry instead.
It was easier that way.

He pictured the way she'd glare at him when she was frustrated, the slight crease between her eyebrows, the way her lips would press together like she was holding something back — the same way she did when she was trying not to laugh, or when she didn't want to admit she cared. She'd always smile afterwards. There would be none of that, now. He could almost hear it, the sharpness in her tone when she would say his name, the way it somehow had heat to it.