Everything I had

He said it was love.
She said it was fear.
He said it was just once.
She never forgot.

Tom knows his anger too well. It follows him like a shadow-quiet until it isn't. He calls it instinct. Others call it something else.

He doesn't talk about feelings. She knows he should.
Tom talks with his fists, with slammed doors, with silence that curdles the air.
Yet beneath the outbursts and control is a boy who never learned how to feel. How to speak and how to be the man he so deeply sought to be. A man still trying to unlearn the rules his father carved into him.

This isn't a love story. Not your usually one. It's not soft, or sweet, or tied with a bow.
Nor is he.

This is a story about anger. About silence. About what happens when no one ever showed you another way.
About changing when no one believes in you anymore.