CHAPTER 101

CHAPTER 101
POV: Dominic

The apartment was too still. Every sound,  the hum of the refrigerator, the faint groan of the pipes felt like an echo of something that used to be alive.

Dominic stood by the window, his suitcase still half-packed from the night before. He hadn’t slept. He hadn’t even tried. The rain had stopped hours ago, but the world outside still looked drenched, the sky a dull slate gray.

He heard the door open behind him. The sound was small but sharp. His hands curled at his sides.

“Dom,” Ethan said softly.

He didn’t turn. Not yet. He couldn’t. The sound of Ethan’s voice was enough to split him open, too familiar, too gentle for what it carried now.

“I didn’t think you’d come back,” Ethan added.

“I live here,” Dominic said, and his voice came out steadier than he felt. “At least, I used to.”

A pause. Footsteps. Then Ethan’s reflection appeared faintly in the glass beside his own smaller, tentative, a ghost of what he used to mean.

“Please,” Ethan said. “Let me explain.”

Dominic finally turned. The look on Ethan’s face nearly undid him, his eyes red, hands shaking, mouth pressed into a thin line like he was holding himself together with sheer force of will.

“There’s nothing to explain,” Dominic said quietly. “I saw enough.”

Ethan took a step forward. “It wasn’t what it looked like.”

Dominic almost laughed. The sound that came out wasn’t laughter, but something rougher. “Then tell me what it was.”

Ethan swallowed. “It was a mistake.”

“A mistake,” Dominic repeated, tasting the word like poison. “You call that a mistake?”

Ethan nodded quickly, desperate. “It didn’t mean anything. I was angry, you were gone, and….”

“Don’t,” Dominic said, his voice sharp enough to cut through the air. Ethan froze. “Don’t turn this into my absence being the reason you found someone else to fill it.”

Ethan’s shoulders sagged. “I’m not blaming you. I just….I didn’t know how to be alone anymore.”

Dominic let out a long breath, eyes closing. That…. that was the truth of it. Not love. Not betrayal in its cruelest form. Just loneliness.

When he opened his eyes again, Ethan was watching him like a man waiting for a verdict.

“You think I don’t understand that feeling?” Dominic said quietly. “Wanting to be seen. To matter to someone. To be wanted, even for a second.”

Ethan’s lips parted, but Dominic kept going. “The difference is, I never tried to fill that hole by breaking someone else.”

The silence that followed was unbearable. The kind that hummed inside the chest, thick and suffocating. Ethan’s eyes filled, but no tears fell. He just stood there, staring at him, like maybe if he didn’t blink, Dominic wouldn’t disappear.

“I’m sorry,” Ethan whispered. “It wasn’t about love. I just…. I needed to feel something again.”

That was the knife. Not the act itself but the confession. The quiet, hollow truth of it.

Dominic nodded slowly. “I know. That’s what makes it worse.”

Ethan stepped closer again, hesitant. “Please, Dom. Don’t walk away from us.”

Dominic almost smiled not kindly, not cruelly. Just tired. “Us,” he repeated. “You say it like it still means something.”

“It does,” Ethan insisted, voice breaking. “I love you.”

Dominic shook his head. “No. You love what we were. And I did too. But that’s gone.”

He picked up his suitcase from the floor. The handle felt too heavy, as if it knew it wasn’t just holding clothes but everything he’d built with someone who didn’t know how to hold it.

Ethan reached for him, fingers brushing his arm. Dominic didn’t pull away, not at first. But when he looked up, saw the panic, the regret and something inside him finally snapped.

“Don’t,” he said softly. “You didn’t just lose me, Ethan. You lost the part of me that believed in us.”

Ethan froze. The words hit him harder than a shout ever could. His hand fell back to his side, trembling.

Dominic turned away. He walked toward the door, the sound of his footsteps echoing against the wooden floor. When he reached the threshold, he stopped because leaving meant it was over, and he wasn’t sure he was ready for that kind of finality.

But staying would only make the wound deeper. He opened the door. The morning light spilled in, harsh and colorless. Behind him, Ethan finally broke.

“Dom, please,” he said, voice raw. “Don’t go.”

Dominic didn’t look back. “I already did,” he said, and stepped out.

The day dragged by in fragments , coffee he didn’t drink, streets he didn’t remember walking, voices that blurred into static. 

He found himself sitting on a bench overlooking the river just as the sun began to dip, orange light scattering across the water like broken glass.

He hadn’t planned on coming here. His body had moved without asking him.

The city hummed around him, people laughing, cars passing  all of it feeling like a world he no longer fit into. He stared at his reflection in the dark water. It didn’t look like him anymore. It looked like someone hollowed out and left behind.

He thought of Ethan, the sound of his laugh when things were still good, the way he used to trace patterns on Dominic’s wrist without realizing it. 

Small, ordinary moments that used to mean everything. He’d memorized them once. Now they felt like fragments of a story that didn’t belong to him.

He pressed his palms together, leaning forward. His mind replayed the scene over and over: the door, the shadows, the stillness. Tyler’s hand. Ethan’s eyes.

Who did he hate more?

He wanted to say Tyler. The manipulator. The one who’d pushed and prodded until the cracks split wide open.

But then he thought of Ethan’s voice, pleading, breaking, telling the truth in fragments. And it wasn’t anger that filled him, it was grief. Grief for the love that had rotted slowly, quietly, until neither of them could recognize it anymore.

And then there was himself, the man who’d seen it coming and looked away, because admitting the truth meant losing it for good.

He let out a shaky breath. “Maybe I hate all of us.”

The river didn’t answer. It just kept moving, slow, endless, uncaring.

He stayed there until the sky went dark, until the cold crept into his hands. Then he stood, exhaled, and started walking again no destination, no plan. Just movement.

Behind him, the city lights shimmered against the water flickering, fragile, almost like hope but Dominic didn’t look back.