He had been her sun, the star she circled endlessly. Helpless against the gravity she’d been unable to fight. She’d flown too close and melted her wings made of wax. She’d fallen.
Maybe she’d never been meant to fly.
Simone did not allow herself to wallow. She forced herself to eat, though every bite choked her. She forced herself to sleep, though sleeping meant she’d dream of him and those dreams were torture because in them, Elliott never turned her away. She got up every morning and forced herself out of bed and into the shower, no matter how much she wanted to stay under the covers.
She refused to let this break her, no matter how broken she felt. It was not the first time she’d given her heart to someone, after all. Or the first time she’d been hurt.
She’d get over it, she told herself when she was brushing her teeth and the woman in the mirror looked like a stranger. She would forget him, she reminded herself as she folded laundry and paid bills. She would move on, Simone tried to convince herself as she stood in the shower with the water pounding all over her and waited to stop feeling so. Fucking. Sad.
Now, tucked into her bed far too early for a weeknight, much less a Saturday, Simone tried to read a book and watch a movie on TV at the same time. Neither kept her attention, and though she’d slept until almost noon, she could barely keep her eyes open. When her phone hummed at her from its place in the speaker dock on her nightstand, she ignored it. It would be Aidan, and she was avoiding him.
The night of the breakup, she’d gone to him out of despair and anger and grief, and he’d given her the pain she needed so she could stop feeling all of those things. He’d give it to her again, if she asked him to, but though she wasn’t ashamed or regretful about what she’d done, Simone didn’t want to repeat it. The unthinkable had happened. She no longer wanted to fuck Aidan.
But she couldn’t tell him that. She still loved him, though that had changed, too. She didn’t want to hurt him, and though he would say he understood, he wouldn’t. Not really.
Halfway through another page, another call came through. Then a text. Simone ignored them both and burrowed deeper into her blankets. She’d lost the remote, which was a pain in the ass because she wanted to turn up the volume so she couldn’t even hear the faintest of peeps from her phone. Before she could find it, her doorbell rang.
There was no fucking way she was getting out of bed to answer it.
No.
Fucking.
Way.
It rang again, and once more she ignored it. Diving on the remote, Simone turned up the volume even though she’d long ago stopped understanding what was happening in the movie. As she found the second remote to pause and rewind—not that she cared anymore what was happening, because she didn’t, she heard her front door open.
Simone froze. She made a quick assessment of the situation. Clad in only a belly baring T-shirt and tiny panties, she was the perfect random ax-murderer victim, at least according to every horror movie she’d ever seen. Home alone, underdressed, with only a TV remote as a weapon. Yep, she was going to get a machete to someplace soft. She was halfway to her closet to grab something she could use to defend herself, a stiletto could do major damage, after all, when her bedroom door creaked open.
”… Simone?”
Simone paused. “Corrina? What the hell?”
Aidan’s girlfriend, his submissive girlfriend, Simone reminded herself, pushed open the door a little further and peeked through, looking a little embarrassed. “Hi. Aidan gave me the key.”
Not sure what to say, Simone tossed the shoe back into the closet. She’d forgotten she’d given him a key, but that didn’t explain what Corrina was doing there. Unless it was to throw down in some kind of epic girl-on-girl catfight, and somehow, Simone doubted that. “Is he here?”
Corrina had the grace to blush and scuff a toe along the
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