Page 2 of Broken Pieces
Right now, I’m slouched at the kitchen table in this godforsaken shithole the state has the balls to call a home. A thick, sour scent clings to everything, even my fucking skin. The linoleum’s fucked, sticky in places, some spots ripped to hell. Every step reminds you exactly how little anyone gives a shit about the kids dumped here.
The walls are stained the color of piss, paint peeling, yellowed edges curling inward as if even the paint wants to escape. Faded handprints linger, ghosts of whoever came before.
Above me, a light buzzes and flickers, desperate to die but never quite making it.
I watch it sputter and think, yeah, I’m the fucking same.
I drop my elbows onto the table’s beat-to-shit surface, skin dragging across splinters and dried-up streaks of glue older than me. I don’t flinch. Pain’s familiar. It’s there when I blink. When I breathe. When I fucking exist. It never fades. Only coils tighter, waiting to blow.
I don’t want to carry it. Don’t want to endure a fucking thing. Not the weight in my chest. Not the heat behind my eyes.
The door groans on its busted hinge, the same tired sound scraping through this place every fucking day, reminding me nothing in this place ever changes.
Another round of discarded kids drifts through the doorway.
They move slowly, shuffling across the cracked linoleum, shoulders bent, eyes empty, faces drained of anything human. The ones who stopped asking questions because they knew the answers were always bullshit.
But they all wear the same forgotten face now.
They shuffle past me in a line, one after the other, skin drained pale beneath the harsh flicker of the light overhead. Their eyes are glazed, their steps mechanical, bodies moving on instinct alone.
The door slams shut behind them.
Something shifts inside me, as if a fault line has split open beneath my ribs.
I feel him before I lift my head.
Heat rolling off him, weight dragging at the edges of the room, a dangerous pull coiling low and refusing to let go.
Zane fucking Rivera.
He doesn’t walk in.
He fucking arrives, the air shifting the second his shadow fills the doorway.
He carries himself with the force of a storm tearing through a sky already surrendered, every step a reminder nothing in his path gets out untouched.
He stands in the doorway with his arms loose at his sides, posture easy but charged. A stance declaring he owns whatever space he steps into.
The leather jacket tells the story without him saying a word, stinking of backseat fucks, bathroom quickies, and fights he never lost. It’s chaos stitched into leather, bragging for him before he even opens his mouth.
His mouth curves with the ghost of a grin, all arrogance and filth, a grin promising he’ll ruin you or make you beg for it.
Every line of him drips with untouchable confidence, every step a dare, reckless to the bone. He’s chaos wrapped in swagger, the storm every girl swears she can handle until she’s already too deep to crawl out. And you know it long before he opens his mouth.
His shoulders roll back as he steps into the room, warping the air and dragging it with him.
Swagger clings to every movement, carved from the fights he walked away from grinning and the rules he never gave a shit about breaking.
It should piss me off.
Should make me scoff, roll my eyes, and turn the fuck away.
But it doesn’t.
The heat sinks low in my gut, hot and wrong, too sharp to ignore and too right to resist.
Trouble doesn’t need words.
