the one where not every story has a happy ending.
based on harry styles' song from the dining table
13 Hours Later.
When she woke up, she was still alone.
Initially, she'd forgotten all about the night before. The first thing she noticed was the strange buzzing sound of the thermostat in the corner, which was obviously not working at all because the room was freezing. The chilly air nipped at her cheeks, and she snuggled further into the mattress as she tucked her head into the comforter with a soft whimper, trying to ignore the buzzing in her head.
Her eyes were still stinging from her tears the night before mixed with the lack of sleep. She'd managed to finally drift off at around four in the morning, but she couldn't tell by the window whether it was eight in the morning or two in the afternoon.
Their screams from the night before still echoed in the walls.
She slid the covers off of her head and opened her eyes slowly, staring at the pale yellow motel ceiling. It was the color of Easter yellow, she'd decided, and it reminded her of chocolate and gardens and everything happy. It reminded her of some distant life where she probably would have done something to be proud of.
The ache in her chest resonated throughout her entire body, and her head was pounding to the rhythm of her heart—it was the only way she could be sure it was still beating.
She felt like someone had torn it out of her chest.
She turned onto her side and looked at the space in the bed beside her, clutching onto the soft material of the comforter until her knuckles turned white. Waking up on her own wasn't new to her—she'd done it time and time again in the past two years, so much that she'd become numb to the loneliness that came with it. But this time was different...
This time, she knew he wasn't coming back.
She suddenly felt a tear roll down her face, and just like that, she couldn't get him out of her head.
He was everywhere.
His voice was stuck in her mind like a song on a loop, and it was a melody of all the things that she had always wanted to hear but never deserved. Years of I love you and I miss you and you're everything, the way that he could somehow make her feel safe in the middle of a hurricane. And it was almost frightening to her how last night all she could think about was everything that would drive her mad, but all she was left with was the pieces that she would miss, the ones that he took from her without even realizing.
She replayed their fight in her head over and over again.
Cameron didn't yell. That was one thing that she'd learned quickly in their relationship—he was more of the quiet type when he was angry, and that always just pissed her off even more because she was a firecracker. She couldn't keep anything in if her life depended on it.
So when Cameron raised his voice that night, she knew that it was all crashing down.
His screams were branded in her mind like an unwanted tattoo, one that would be just as painful to remove as it was to get it in the first place. Her mind flashed back to her curled up on the bed, and she didn't know what hurt more—the sound, or the silence.
She could still feel the seething words lodged in her throat that she'd thrown at him that night. Like a phantom limb she felt them, so deeply rooted that she could have choked on them right there.
She suddenly gasped, her hot breath coming out in puffs of air that she could see in the cold room.
She hadn't even realized that she was crying.
