Chapter Twenty Eight Preview
J U N E
The rooms were too still when I woke. Not peaceful. Peace had a pulse. It shifted in corners, breathed under doors, left evidence of living behind it. A cup on the wrong table. A sweater over the arm of a chair. Someone moving cautiously in another room, trying and failing not to be heard.
Now don't get confused, this was definitely not peace. This was silence with its eyes open.
For a few seconds, I stayed exactly as I was, cheek against the pillow, one hand caught beneath the sheet, already aware of the wrongness before I knew where to place it. The bedroom illuminated with the blue-gray hour before morning, when the windows were no longer black but the city had not yet become itself. Heat sizzled through the vents. Somewhere deep in the walls, metal expanded with a tired little groan.
Calum was gone.I knew before I turned. His side of the bed was cold. Not cool to the touch. Not recently abandoned. Not the small absence left when someone has gone to the bathroom or stood at the sink, shaving carefully, trying not to wake you. Gone long enough that his body warmth had been erased.
I reached for my phone. My fingers found the nightstand. The charger. A glass of water. I reach further and feel nothing else. What the fuck? My eyes opened. I snapped my neck towards the bed stand and I stared at the empty space beside the white cord.
For a foolish second, I waited for my mind to rescue me. To remember I had left it beneath my pillow, tangled in the blanket, tucked into the side of the bed. Somewhere stupid. Somewhere ordinary. Somewhere that did not mean anything.
It did not.
I sat up. My elbows pressed against the pillow. The sheet slid to my waist. My heart was already beating too fast, as if my body had received the news before the rest of me.
I checked under the pillow. Under the blanket. Between the mattress and the nightstand. The floor.
Nothing. Fucking nothing.
"Calum?" I call out. My voice barely made it across the room.
Of course. No answer.
I got out of bed. The heated floor met my bare feet with expensive warmth, and somehow that made everything worse. Warmth should have comforted me. Instead, it felt like the rooms were defending themselves.
You are safe.
You are cared for.
Stop being dramatic.
I moved through the bedroom first, then the bathroom, then the closet. I checked places I knew it would not be because panic made a fool out of logic. No phone. No Calum. What is happening?
In the hall, the security panel glowed beside the front door, blue and certain. Armed. Imitating. Watching. Waiting for the kind of mistake it had been built to punish. The kitchen was dark except for the oven clock.
6:45 a.m.
I stood barefoot on the cold edge where the rug ended and stared at the numbers. It was too early for the day to have started without me and for his side of the bed to be empty that way.
No coffee had been made. No sight of his particular routine. No water ran in the bathroom. No drawer slid open and closed with Calum's careful morning restraint. No belt buckle clicked softly in the bedroom. No quiet shuffles.. No shadow passing over the doorway. No pause at the edge of the bed where he sometimes stood and looked at me before he left.
Nothing.
Only the stupid armed door. The missing phone. And me, standing in the dark like I had woken after the verdict had already been read.
My throat tightened with emotion. I went back and searched again. The pillow. The sheets. The bathroom counter. The dresser drawers. The chair where I had dropped my sweater. My bag. The space beneath the bed.
Gone. It was definitely gone. He had taken it. Again. Like the act of violation meant absolutely nothing. The thought did not turn into anger at first. It bubbled into heat under my skin.
Shame. Always shame first. The worst thing about being controlled by someone who loved you was how difficult it became to stay cleanly furious. There was always a reason. Always a threat. Always some horror waiting outside the door to make him right. That was how it got inside you. Not with cruelty. With evidence.
I stood in the bedroom doorway, arms wrapped around myself, staring down the hall at the lock, the panel, the sealed mouth of the front door.
Sixteen days.
That was how long Calum's safety had been tightening around me. At first, I had tried to be reasonable. I had tried so hard it made me embarrassed now. Someone had sent me a box with my hair inside it. Someone had gotten close enough to cut it. Someone had found me at work, through my phone, through the small familiar paths I used to believe belonged to me.
Of course, Calum was careful. Of course, he was afraid. Of course, none of this was normal. Yet, safety had a ferocious appetite. It did not stop after one day inside. It asked for another. Then class. Then work. Then the coffee shop. Then walking alone. Then Rowan, unless someone knew first. Then the elevator. Then the door. With the cherry on top, my phone, until he decided it could be mine again.
I walked into the living room once more and lowered myself into the corner of the couch. I pulled a blanket over my bare legs even though I was not cold.
Outside the windows, the city slowly became morning. People moved along the sidewalks below in dark coats, heads tucked against the wind. Tiny figures from this height. Strangers with trains to catch, coffee to spill, professors to disappoint, bosses to hate. Lives full of ordinary irritations. Small freedoms disguised as errands.
They were going somewhere. Doors opened for them because they had places to be. I had a view. That was not the same as a life. It wasn't even close to comparable.
The penthouse looked beautiful in the early light. Silver windows. Clean counters. Long floors washed in the weak winter glow. Furniture arranged with the kind of taste that made a room seem intelligent and untouched. It should have felt calm.
It felt staged.
Calm had looseness to it. Human evidence. A mug forgotten on a table. Shoes near the door. A sweater dragged off and left where exhaustion dropped it. This place never looked tired. It never looked interrupted. Even without Calum in it, it still felt like him. Controlled. Exact. Impossible to disturb without being noticed.
I looked toward the oven again.
6:52.
Calum had been absent long enough for the air to lose him. Frustratingly, he had taken the only thing that made me feel attached to anything beyond these walls.
My phone was not just a phone anymore. That was humiliating too. It had become proof that some part of me still existed outside his reach. Proof that I could answer or ignore, call or not call, scroll through something empty and stupid because empty and stupid things were allowed to belong to me.
Now even that proof was gone. My hands started to shake, so I tucked them beneath the blanket.
When I was five, the first foster house I remembered had a linen closet at the end of the hallway. I did not think about Miss Laura often. Or maybe I did. Maybe I had only learned to turn away before the memory got close enough to breathe on me.
Some memories did not live in the mind. They lived lower than that. In the stomach. In the skin. In the part of you that heard a lock click and became a child before thought could stop it.
Miss Laura drank gin from a tea glass. Even then, I knew it was not tea. I knew because her voice changed after she drank it. The whole house changed. The rooms tightened. The air grew sharper, smaller, as if the walls had leaned in to listen.
She had yellow hair curled too tightly and perfume that smelled powdery and sour, flowers kept too long in dirty water. She laughed loudly on the phone when other people were listening. When we were alone, her face went flat.
Once, I cried because I wanted my mother. I did not even know if I knew exactly who I meant. Only that I wanted someone. Miss Laura told me no one was coming. Then she put me in the linen closet until I could learn some peace. I was in there for hours. By the time she opened the door, I had wet myself and she smelled like liquor.
After that, she kept doing it. Not every night. That would have been easier in its own awful way. Predictable fear could be prepared for. You could build a ritual around it. Count steps. Count sounds. Learn the hour.
Miss Laura was worse.
Sometimes she locked me in because I cried. Sometimes because a man came over. Sometimes because she was going out and did not want to deal with me when she came home.
That was what she said once, laughing into the phone as she pushed me inside.
I don't want to deal with her tonight.
I had not understood every word. Only enough. The closet was easier for her than I was. That was the part that stayed. Not the dark. The listening. Her heels crossing the kitchen tile. The cabinet opening. Ice cracking in a glass. Keys. The front door.
Then the house going eerily silent. My innocent self, small in the dark, waiting for someone else to decide when I existed again.
I opened my eyes. Calum's home was warm. Beautiful. Brightening by the minute in all the ways money could make a place look harmless. Still, some buried part of me had been triggered.
A locked place. A life continuing somewhere outside it. Me inside, waiting for the sound of a key. My mind knew the difference. My body did not. That was the terrible thing about a body. It remembered trauma before reasons.
A lock was a lock. Waiting was waiting. Gone was gone.
The door clicked. Every muscle in me seized. It was not even the door opening yet. Just the system shifting, that small mechanical sound I had learned against my will. A minute later, the front door opened. Calum stepped in with the cold still on him.Winter air followed behind him laced with the scent of smoke and wet pavement. Beneath it, the darker scent I had started to associate with him alone, as if danger had its own skin and he wore it well.
Calum shut the door and worked the locks without looking. Then he turned. His almond eyes found me immediately. They always did. His attention narrowed when he saw me on the couch. Not softness. Calum was rarely soft in any visible way. It was something more precise. He looked at me as if he had walked into a room and found one object moved from where he had left it.
"June."
I stood. "Where's my fucking phone?" His hand paused near his coat pocket. The answer was on his face before he chose which version of it to give me. "Where is it?"
"With Luca."
The room seemed to tilt. "With Luca?"
Calum sighed. "I needed it checked."
"For what?" I pressed, my feet tapping against the floor. His silence was short. Too irritatingly short. "Calum."
His jaw shifted."You got another text."
I took a deep breath to realize the weight on my chest. "When?"
Calum cleared his throat, I could see the exhaustion weighing heavy in his eyes. "Three thirteen."
"You've had my phone since three in the morning?"
"I took it after the message came through."
"While I was asleep." I pointed out.
Calum slightly nodded his head, "Yes."
"And then you left."
Calum tilted his head, "I took it to Luca."
"You left me here with no phone and no explanation." I point out.
"You were asleep." Calum reasoned, his shoulders shurgging.
I roll my eyes and chew on my bottom lip. "That makes it worse." Something moved across his face. A flicker. Gone before I could name it. "What did it say?"
Calum removed his coat and laid it over the back of a chair. "Nothing useful."
I scoffed, shaking my head. "No. That is not an answer."
Calum lowered his voice."It's the answer I'm giving you."
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Read chapter twenty eight from the story Kept C.H AU by emrosefitzgerald (e.f) with 7 reads. 5sosfanfic, bad, collegero...
