Page 17 of When Hearts Ignite

“Quiet down, Audrey. Steven is sleeping. And it’s over for good.”

Mother’s cries echoed in the halls and I buried my head in my blankets, not wanting to hear anything else. I wanted to escape, to find Jess and Emily or Nana. I didn’t want to be here.

“I-I love you, Robert. I gave you everything I could. Please don’t do this. Don’t break us up. What about our kids? They need you. We need you.”

Maybe Father didn’t give us hugs because his hugs belonged to that lady and the little girl.

Maybe we weren’t good enough to deserve his hugs.

Maybe we weren’t good enough to deserve his love.

I wished he’d love me.

The rumble of thunder crashed in the room again and the windows shook and shuddered.

But I wasn’t scared anymore. I wished my sadness would go away.

Perhaps Father has been right all along. We shouldn’t let our emotions get the best of us.

Liabilities. All of it.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

My eyes snap back open as I sit up, thankful for my phone to halt my trip down memory lane. My memories are spotty—I don’t remember their faces—only the face of my father. How devastated he was. How the tears streamed down his cheeks, even though the sky was also crying that night.

Sweat drips down my back and I fling off the thick comforter from my body. My heart races, the rioting in my chest relentless, and I bury my face into my palms. My fingers rake over my hair, damp from my fevered dream.

A wave of dizziness hits me, and I breathe through the nausea churning in my gut.

It’s in the past. Everything is fine.

A ringing reaches my ears and I turn off the market notifications on my phone—most likely information coming in from the Asian markets where it’s still daytime. I must have forgotten to silence my phone before I went to bed last night. Wincing, I glance at the time.

Three-thirty a.m. Fuck. Only two hours of sleep tonight.

The room is dark. Stifling. The wailing of the wind cuts through the silence. The faint glow of twilight seeps through the gap between the thick blackout curtains. Muffled sounds of cars and trucks from the streets far below filter through the double-paned windows.

My breathing slows from the hurried pants to its usual rhythm.

I’m in New York, not LA.

It’s all a dream.

A dream or fragments of memories I haven’t thought about in a long time. The past only reoccurs when storms rage outside.

Another notification chimes through and I glare at the screen.

I roll out my tense shoulders and swing my legs off the bed. I trudge toward the floor-to-ceiling windows in my bedroom, turning the thermostat colder along the way. My chest is still damp from exertion and droplets of sweat drip down the valleys of my muscles like I just ran five miles on the treadmill.

The burst of cool air greets me in a chilly welcome, and goosebumps soon form on my skin, but I like the shock to the system, the extreme temperatures chasing away the remnants of unease inside me, temporarily allowing me to forget the extra weight on my chest.

I whip open the curtains, staring at the city below me. The buildings are lit up like stars in the skies, even though it’s impossible to see the skies at this hour in the dead of twilight. From my windows, I can see trees swaying sharply to the wind—a storm is brewing on the horizon—but the city doesn’t bend to its will, the electrifying energy couldn’t be quashed, and the streaks of lights from cars hurrying to their next destinations, the illumination of tall buildings surrounding us, and even the glow of street lamps in the large expanse of Central Park below are all collective fuck yous to the bad weather.

Or bad memories.

This is why I love New York. It’s the place where if you get back up after you fall down, you still have a shot of winning the race, of conquering your demons.

It’s a place where only results matter, not the journey, and most definitely not emotions.

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