As I’m puzzling over a passage that isn’t quite right, I feel something on my thigh. When I look down, Scarlett’s hand has found me in her sleep. My heart cracks wide open, and my breath catches in my lungs.

A glance at the time tells me it’s long past the hour I told myself I’d stay. But now her hand has found me, as if she needs me to stay as much as I want to be here.

I’ll leave when her hand moves, I tell myself.

It’s not long before I drift off to sleep, too.

Chapter 18

Scarlett

I’m used to waking up in a fog, usually from working late the night before. Sometimes from waking up too early to do it again. Words blend into each other, jostling and fighting for space in my brain. They rarely leave room for anything else except, occasionally, a nagging feeling that I’ll never do enough, be enough, write enough.

But there’s only one word in my mind when I wake up the next morning.

Ryan.

The sun is streaming through my east-facing window when I crack my eyes open. Dust dances in the beams of light, and it feels like an accurate metaphor for what I’m feeling right now. Cobwebs and dirt are illuminated by the golden hour, all the more beautiful for how they move and shine. My brain isn’t clear, but I can see the grime. Maybe that’s the thing that needs to happen before I can clean it out.

And Ryan was the one who shone a light on it all. I had been deep in my own world, convinced this is just how it is for me: I can write and live a life of isolation and exhaustion with Trina as my only connection to the outside world, or I can never write again and cobble together some semblance of a normal life. But with only one evening having him near me, I can already see that a happy medium might be possible, because the way I feel now, I could conquer not only this manuscript but maybe even another.

Smiling to myself, I reach out to where I had felt the mattress sag next to me last night as I was finally, blissfully drifting off to sleep. Only now, it’s empty.

Of course it is. He said he was going to stay until I fell asleep and then leave. A quick glance at my phone reveals no messages from him, and the fact that it’s already eight in the morning. I can’t remember the last time I slept this late. And as late as it is, Ryan is probably long gone by now.