2_The Pulse of Betrayal
590 Words
Two days after that poisoned encounter, my phone vibrated. It was a digital pulse piercing the stillness of my room—a notification from an unknown account. I opened it with a hollow heart, still searching for traces of Noah in the corners of my memory, until I read the name: Luca.
It wasn’t him; it was the shadow that trailed the sun that had burned me. He wrote with a calculated simplicity, a clinical coldness as if testing the boundaries of my patience or feeling for a pulse of surrender: "Do you remember that night?"
I hesitated. I took a long time—minutes, perhaps an eternity—to gather the scattered fragments of my soul, torn between Noah’s piercing gaze and my own fragile reality. Then I answered with a single word, the very noose I tightened around my own wrist: "Yes."
From that one oblivious word, everything spiraled out of control.
At first, it was just light conversation—an exchange of words that seemed innocent on the surface but was, in its depths, a systematic emotional brainwashing. I responded with a forced, calm logic, a desperate attempt to hide the bitter truth: my heart remained a captive of Noah, a man who said nothing with his tongue but colonized me entirely with his eyes.
As the days bled into one another, the calls involving the three of us—Luca, Noah, and me—became a daily ritual, a form of exquisite torture. I would hear Noah’s voice in the background; his low laughter, his sparse words falling on my ears like shards of heaven, coaxing an involuntary, submissive smile from my lips. Luca was the one calling, the one initiating, but he was never the reason for my feverish anticipation of those calls.
I was waiting for Noah.
I lived for the way he pronounced my name, as if it were a sacred secret belonging only to us amidst the noise of others. Those calls were a parallel life—ordinary from the outside, but igniting fires within me that only his voice could extinguish. Noah didn’t know he had become the only part of my day worth living for. And Luca? Luca had no idea I wasn't waiting for him, but for the echo of his friend.
But everything began to shift with a haunting speed, as if Luca sensed my spirit slipping through his fingers. He began to write incessantly, questioning the suffocating details of my small day, my studies, my thoughts—as if trying to occupy every void where Noah might seep in. I answered with a practiced coldness, maintaining a safety distance, yet he had a devious way of pulling me back into the dialogue, making me feel as if I were being forced into a bottomless well.
Then, the shock fell like a cold blade across my chest: "Luca... is in love with my best friend."
I laughed. I laughed hysterically at myself, at my heart that never learned how to choose the right path. What a dark, karmic irony. I obsess over Noah with a devastating hunger, I cling to Luca like a drowning soul grasping a rock that will surely crush me, and now I watch myself dissolve between the two—torn between a love that rejects me and an attachment that chokes me. I have become a mere puppet in a game whose rules I do not know, and the only loser is me.
- Writer
