Page 59 of The Spark

I flinched. That tone—tight, trembling, trying not to break—it killed me.

“You got it,” she whispered, shaking her head.

A car door opened. She got in without another glance.

And I stood there—on that sidewalk—watching the woman I loved disappear into the night.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I couldn’t go after her.

Because what was I gonna do? Apologize? Promise it meant nothing? I hadn’t even touched Tasha like that, but I let her hover. Let her orbit too long, feeding off the space I created when I started pulling away.

My silence let Amaya feel alone and that’s on me.

When I finally turned back toward the studio, my hands were curled into fists. My chest ached with a kind of pressure I couldn’t shake. The kind that told me I’d already fucked this up worse than I even realized.

Inside, the whole vibe had shifted.

Tasha was grabbing her bag, eyes red, sniffing like she was the one who lost something.

I didn’t say a word to her and didn’t even look her way. She wasn’t the story here. Amaya was. I didn’t give a fuck what had her feelings hurt.

Raj stood by the soundboard, arms crossed, his expression tight.

“She was waiting for that moment,” he muttered. His head tilted towards the door. “Tasha. She set that shit up.”

“I know.”

He watched me for a beat, then said, “I told her to fall back. She won’t be a problem anymore.”

The way he said it—calm, measured, final—hit different. There was a chill in it. Not fake or performative, but bone-deep. That wasn’t just Raj talking.

That was Shine’s son— the son of a legend of the streets that even I knew about. I nodded once, jaw clenched. Didn’t trust myself to say more.

Because if I opened my mouth, even for a second, I might fall all the way apart. I might expose the fracture I was barely holding shut.

I didn’t go to Amaya’s place and get into another argument with her. She deserved better than that. And her apartment was too sacred to me. It is where our love bloomed. It was too soft. Too good. Too full of everything I didn’t deserve right now.

I wasn’t about to track this pain across her floor.

So I did the only thing I could. I went to my condo. The one that had finally been finished. The one I hadn’t set foot in sincethat night—the one we spent together after our first date.

Just one night. But it haunted the whole place.

The second I opened the door, the silence met me like a punch to the chest. It was too empty. it didn’t feel like her, smell like her.

It didn’t sound like her laugh bouncing off the walls or her voice asking if we had wine chilled. But the memory of her lived in the air. In the floorboards. In the bedsheets we’d tangled.

The night she rode me with moonlight painting her skin, her body open, trusting, beautiful. The way she whispered my name like she already knew it belonged to her.

That night, she made this place feel like a home. Now it was just square footage. And I was just a man who had everything he wanted… And still found a way to fuck it up.

25

Iwanted to believe it would get easier.

That if I ignored his calls long enough, stopped staring at my phone every time it buzzed, stopped expecting to hear his key in the lock, the ache in my chest would fade.

It didn’t.

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