Page 59 of Red Flagged
Then she walked past me without meeting my gaze.
I reached for her waist. I couldn’t help it; my fingers just needed to feel her, to make sure she was warm and solid and—fuck—real. That she hadn’t already vanished into a version of herself I couldn’t reach. My hand landed just above the curve of her hip. Her heat scorched my palm, but she didn’t stop.
She didn’t turn or melt, didn’t reach back or press into me the way she always did, like her body knew mine by instinct.
I whispered her name. “Auri…”
Still, she kept walking. I followed, my heart slamming against my ribs, trying again, this time with both hands, turning her gently by the shoulder before she could leave the room. She let me, yet when her eyes met mine, there was no softness. No desperate clinging, no relief, no forgiveness. Just that devastating calm.
Her voice was low. “Not now.”
Two words. That was all it took to gut me.
Not now.Not a no, not yet, not fuck you. Justnot now.
But that was worse. Because it meantmaybe. It meant maybe not ever. It meant I didn’t get to fix this with one touch or one word or one night. It meant maybe I’d broken something I couldn’t see, and now she had to choose whether I was worth salvaging.
It meant I had no fucking clue how big of a mistake I’d made.
“Auri,please.” The word scraped out before I could stop it. I reached for her again, fingertips brushing her wrist. “Just—just look at me. Talk to me. Tell me what I did wrong, and I’ll fix it, I swear to God?—”
Her eyes hardened, and the coldness in them nearly stopped my heart. “You can’t fix everything, Callum.”
It wasn’t a shout. It wasn’t cruel. It was worse. It was quiet and matter-of-fact. A statement of truth that landed like a knife to my heart.
She turned away. The sound of her heels against the floor was all I could hear as she left the room. My pulse pounded in my ears so loud I almost didn’t hear the muted hiss of the shower pipe through the wall. My palms were clammy, my gut uneasy.
The thought of her walking away—of her deciding that this was it, the line I’d finally crossed—knocked the air out of me sohard my chest seized. It wasn’t dramatic, not a gasp or a choke, just that awful, slow realization that I couldn’t get enough air. Every inhale felt like swallowing gravel. Every exhale came too fast. My lungs weren’t working. My chest wasn’t rising properly.
What did I do?
What the fuck did I do?
How did I get this so wrong?
I just wanted to help, to make things better, to take some of it off her shoulders. But I was incapable of even that.
I wanted to give her everything—the world, the entire fucking universe—but all I’d done was hurt her. And I can’t take it back. Can’t un-say it. Can’t un-do it.
Now she doesn’t even want to touch me. Doesn’t want to look at me.
She’s disgusted by me.
The words rattled in my head, constant and badgering, until my body started to believe them. The walls inched closer. My pulse roared in my ears. Air sawed in and out of me, my lungs trying to make room that wasn’t there.
Because I’d been here before. Different rooms, different faces, but the same aftermath. People who loved me until they didn’t, until I said the wrong thing, pushed too hard, opened my mouth and ruined it all.
And then came the silence. The stillness. The relief on their faces when I finally stepped away.
Maybe that’s who I was. The problem. The crack in every foundation.
I’d spent my whole life trying to outrun it—faster cars, louder victories—but it always caught me. And now it had caughther.
My throat burned. I tried to swallow, but it felt like sandpaper. My vision tunneled, edges going dark, and I forced a breath in through my nose, out through my mouth, the way all those expensive therapists had taught me. It didn’t help.
Nothing fucking helped.
With trembling hands, I turned off all the lights, turning to close the bedroom door behind me. Lightning flared through the narrow hotel window, washing the room white for a heartbeat before the dark folded back in.
