Page 12 of Diesel
I don’t say this. She’s scared and upset. Pushing her will make her retreat more, maybe even run again. I don’t know how to navigate this though. We’ve never been so opposed before.
“And where exactly are you going if I let you walk out that door, Makenna?” I ask.
“Max,” she corrects.
This time I bristle. “I’ve already told you I’m not calling you that.”
I won’t let her disappear into a persona she created to protect herself.
“Of course not. Why would you ever listen to anything I want?”
Fuck me. What the hell do I say to that? I clamp my mouth shut and she doesn’t offer anything either.
The silence is wrong. Oppressive in a way that makes my mind feel too loud. I want to wrap her in my arms, tell her I’m sorry for everything, even the things I might do in the future—but I’m scared to say the wrong thing.
“You know that man at the hotel has probably called the police, right?”
She says it as if I’m supposed to care. I don’t. “Did you even have a plan?” I can’t resist asking, because I know she won’t have. Working out the details has never been her strongest quality. “I mean, were you just planning to bounce between hotels until you ran out of money? Because that’s not a life, babe.”
Her eyes roll like a petulant teenager. “And being in a loveless marriage is?”
I grind my teeth together. Loveless? That’s what she believes? That there’s nothing left between us? She might as well have poured paraffin on the fire already smouldering inside me.
“We are not in a loveless marriage,” I growl. My tone cuts like glass.
She doesn’t get to rewrite our history or change our story just because she’s pissed at me.
“Aren’t we?” She sits up slowly, clutching the barrier of fabric around her so tight her knuckles whiten. “What would you call this then?” Before I can answer, she continues, “What does it matter anyway? Love isn’t real. It’s just chemicals the brain is too stupid to realise are a trick to make people procreate, right?”
I wince as she throws my words back at me, words I’d said when I was younger—dumber. Before I understood what it felt like to fall so deep into another person there’s no start or end between us.
I believed it back then. Of course I did. From the moment I took my first breath I’d never known love or affection. I grew up in shadows, in pain and fear. Makenna was the first person to really see me, to care about me when no one else did. To make me feel.
When I first met her, I hated the world. I wanted to burn it all down, but then she taught me how to let good things slip into those spaces I’d kept locked away.
“I was an idiot when I said that,” I admit.
Her eyes slip shut. “You’re not an idiot, Zane. You’re a beautifully brilliant man who I love with every beat of my heart, but we both know this marriage has been over for a long time.”
Those words land like a detonation. No. I refuse to believe that. I can’t think without her, can’t breathe when she’s away from me. I haven’t slept fully for three days knowing she was out there without me. My heart didn’t beat properly. My skin felt too tight. My thoughts were erratic and muddled. It felt like I’d lost a piece of me. The most important piece of me.
But I don’t know how to put that into something she’ll understand.
So I repeat my earlier question. “What do you want to eat?”
There’s a beat of silence and then she huffs. “I don’t want anything.”
I ignore her and move into the kitchen. She’ll behungry. She likes to pick, to snack. She eats when she’s stressed and right now, she’s at critical level.
There are packets of dried food, a few tins, crisps stuffed in the back of the cupboard that look like they’ve been there long enough to become sentient.
I accused her of not having a plan, but what the fuck is mine? Keep her locked up here forever? Demand she love me? Fuck. I tear my fingers through my hair, trying to breathe through the panic swelling inside me.
Usually I know every move before it happens and I plan for every possible outcome, but this… this has blindsided me.
I steel my spine. I’ll put it right. I have to. There’s no other choice.
I head back into the room to tell her we need to take a trip to the nearest supermarket, but my footsteps falter.
