“Are you okay?” I ask again.
His voice holds no kindness, no warmth, not even familiarity when he says, “No, Sloane. I am not okay.”
My throat collapses around the words I want to say. Heat erupts beneath my skin, burning every inch of me from the inside out. My gaze bounds between the confines of Rowan’s dark, sharp stare, its edges bordering on lethal. “What’s going on?”
“What’s going on is that you need to go home.”
“Okay… I’ll just get an Uber—”
“No. To Raleigh. You need to go back where you belong.”
“I don’t…” a sudden burst of emotion chokes my throat. My nose burns. A sting floods my eyes. “I don’t understand.”
Rowan drags a hand through his hair and breaks his gaze away before he takes another step backward, clearly agitated that I’m lingering here. I’m desperate to take a step closer, to just touch him and make whatever this is stop before it all disintegrates in my hand like a castle of sand swept out to sea.
“Did I do something? If I did something, you need to tell me. We can talk it through.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose as a frustrated sigh empties from his lungs. “You didn’t do anything Sloane, this just isn’t fucking working. And I need you to go.”
“But… I thought you said we would do what normal people do. Talk to one another. Make it work.”
“We’re not ‘normal people’, Sloane. We can’t pretend to be something we’re not. Not anymore. I told you this back in April, on the tenth. I said that I never wanted to be like everybody else.”
I shake my head, trying to claw my way through confusion and into my memories. “I don’t remember—”
“Tenth or the thirteenth. Whatever. It’s just like I told you in the car on the way to the gala. I said even then that the restaurant was the only thing that made sense in my life. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that there are some things we can never have. I can never have a normal life. Neither can you. We’re monsters in this world.”
I know I’m not a normal person, but I don’t feel like a monster. I feel like a weapon. The final justice on behalf of those who can’t speak, delivering punishment for those who don’t deserve clemency. But maybe Rowan is right. Maybe I’ve just been deluding myself about my reign of vengeance, and I’m every bit the monster as the prey that we hunt.
I’m caught on these questions when Rowan lets out a frustrated sigh, like this is taking up too much of his time. The hurt of it twists and burns in my chest.
“My restaurants are all that really matters,” he says, pointing toward the dining room before pressing his finger to the stainless steel counter. “I need to keep my focus here. Trying to have both these places and a relationship is not feasible for me. So you need to leave. Go home.”
Rowan’s hard stare doesn’t let up. It drills right into the depths of me. It doesn’t waver as the first tear falls from my lashes to carve a hot line down my cheek. He doesn’t even blink when the next ones quickly follow.
“But… I love you, Rowan,” I whisper.
Rowan isn’t warm, or kind, or anything but cold and clinical when he says, “You think you do, but you don’t. Because you can’t.”
My mind is spinning. My heart is crumbling into ash. Part of me wants to run as much as he wants me to. Run and run until I don’t even know where I am anymore. Until I can’t feel this pain.
But I plant my feet.
“I’ll go, if that’s what you want,” I say, my voice tight and small. “But I need you to tell me something first, please.”
“What.”
“I need to know why I’m unloveable.”
It’s the first time I’ve seen even the slightest hint of hesitation in Rowan since I stepped into this kitchen. But in an instant, he swallows it down. And nothing else comes.
My anger blisters beneath the weight of this imploding loss. “Tell me.”
I’m met with nothing but a dark, lightless stare. Tears flood my vision until I can barely see Rowan through the watery veil.
“Just be honest with me. Why can’t you love me? What’s wrong with me? Tell me—”
“Because you’re a fucking psycho, that’s why.”
Rowan’s words hit me like a slap. The tears stop. My breath stops. My shattered heart. Even time. The moment of silence between us feels eternal, a pain that’s carved right into whatever is left of my soul, his words branded there forever. I know in an instant they’ll follow me, a ghost that will never let go.
Rowan folds his hands into tight fists as he leans a little closer, as though trying to force this revelation through my eyes and into my brain. “You kill people and cut bits of them off and make an elaborate show out of stringing up some batshit crazy map that no one can figure out but you. Then you gouge out their fucking eyes and make them into decorations. I know I’m no fucking saint, but that shit is next-level insane. That is what’s wrong with you Sloane. You’re unhinged. You’re going to crash and burn. You’ll take me with you if I let this keep going. So you need to fucking leave.”
I take an unsteady step backward, then another, and another. Discomfort registers for the first time in my hand, and I realize I’ve been gripping the restaurant key so tightly that it’s bitten into my skin. I pull it from my pocket and stare at the silver resting on the red marks in my palm.
My gaze lifts, not to Rowan but the sketch I drew last year. It’s framed near the door to the front of the restaurant, right where Rowan can see it as he works, where it’s safe from the heat and humidity in the kitchen. Just like I thought it was safe in his skin. Like I was safe in his heart.
But I’m not.
When my attention drags to Rowan, I hold his eyes for the last time.
I give myself just one breath to remember every detail of his beautiful face. His full lips. That scar I wish I could kiss. His navy eyes, even though their glare cuts right through me.
In the next breath, I turn my hand and let the key slide from my skin and fall to the floor.
I say nothing more as I pivot on my heel and leave 3 In Coach.
I run the whole way back to his apartment. Twelve blocks. Three flights of stairs. It’s only when I take my set of house keys from my pocket and burst into the living room in a mess of sweat and uneven breaths that I let myself cry again.
I’m a fucking psycho.
I thought he was just like me. I thought we were the same. It might have started with a game, but even from the beginning, it felt like so much more. Like I’d finally found a kindred soul. All these years, these crazy experiences, the longing and loneliness of the in-between—I thought it added up to something brighter on our horizon. We were getting closer, weren’t we?
It’s what I let myself believe.
How could I have been so wrong all this time?