Page 117 of The Fate Of Us

"No, Addy—"

"Don't." Her eyes, no fire to be seen in them, found their way to me. "Don't try and say I'm not right."

Her chest rose and fell at a speed that made the ghost of panic dig its claws into my back, pinning me down. She gained control over them shortly, enough for her spine to straighten and the realisations splash across her face. I couldn't move as her lips pried open and she whispered, "I can't be here."

And with that, she slammed the door, the notion rattling the lamps and furniture in itspath. I don’t know how long I stood there, replaying every second of what had just happened.

The play button was taunting me, until I realised how pathetic that sounded in my headand I pressed the damned thing, the music from the montage that was playing making the silence flee.

I took a seat on the edge of the bed, my eyes glued to the blur of auburn and blonde andsmiles and laughs and everything else the directors thought to squeeze into the montage. Until the music died down and Addy and Asher were on a beach, somewhere I presumed was near where her parent’s house was, just from how the cliffside looked, whereabouts the sun was balancing on the horizon.

The laughs stopped, and the looks between them went still. And what happened nextmade me feel hollow, like it was my turn for my soul to leave my body, leaving me a shell of the man I was just a second ago.

“Oh, fuck.” Slipped out of my already parted mouth, none of the adrenalin that wascoursing through my body backing those words at all.

It was the reaction to seeing Asher’s character whip out a Polaroid camera that causedthem. It was the result of seeing their bodies morph into the pose I’d had engraved in every corner of my mind that made me stand up. It was the way I watched their mouths crash into each other, how I’d imagined the Polaroid would have looked if I could press play, turn it into a moving memory.

It wasn’t real. The kiss. It was… pretend.

My knees grew weak at the realisation. My head was spinning with all the answers I’dbeen searching for since the moment I found it. My eyes stayed glued to the TV screen as the photo fell from the camera and onto the sand, the coastal air sweeping it away, coursing a squeal from Addy as they both chased it down the sandbank, the camera panning upwards the sunset before fading to black.

I felt like my life was fading to black right now. I felt so sunken, dead. I was dangerously closeto the end and I didn’t know what to do with myself. It took me longer than I would have liked to realise this was the worst panic attack I’d ever sat through. One that I had to go through alone, in a room that was getting smaller by the second.

I went back into survival mode.

Breathe in.

Hold

Think of Addy—

No. No. No.

Thinking of her only projected what I’d just watched and replayed in my mind.

It wasn’t working. Why wasn’t she helping?

I tried again.

Breath in.

Hold

Addy—

Fuck! Fuck! No!

My hands held my head, and I dropped to my knees, before curling them up to my chestand sobbing like I never had before. My breaths not really breaths at all. Instead, they were gasps with nothing to back them.

I couldn’t feel my heart, and yet I’d never felt it beat this hard before.

I’d been wrong. I’d been wrong about everything. She never gave up on me. Never liedto me. Never stopped loving me. I was wrong. I’d messed up on a global scale. I was an idiot, who never deserved an ounce of love that she’d willingly given to me, after everything I’d put her through.

She was right. Maybe we were doomed from the start. I’d wasted so many years of what we could have been. And for what? I’d wastedcountless minutes. Millions of hours that could have been spent figuring out the world together. I’d wasted years hating her for something she never did. I’d fucked up.

And now I’d lost her.

I’d lost Adaline Moore.

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