Chapter 15
1398 Words
*Alexander's POV*
The glass was empty again.
I stared at it for a long moment, then slid it across the bar without a word. The bartender refilled it without being asked. Smart man. I wasn't in the mood to talk. I wasn't in the mood for anything, honestly. I just wanted to sink slowly and let the alcohol pull me all the way under.
"She loved me," I muttered, pressing two fingers hard against my temple. "She actually loved me."
The bar was alive around me. Music. Laughter. The clinking of glasses. Everyone celebrating something I couldn't see and didn't care about. The whole world was spinning forward, and I was stuck frozen in one moment, one name I couldn't stop saying inside my head.
Elena.
"And I threw it all away." I laughed at my own glass. A broken, hollow sound. "I threw her away."
I downed the whiskey in one go and pushed the glass forward again.
"Another," I said.
"Sir, perhaps you've had enough..."
"Another." I didn't raise my voice. I didn't need to.
He poured.
You chose Eliza, something inside me said. *You chose the wrong woman.*
"I know," I whispered.
"Excuse me?"
I blinked. Looked up.
She had appeared from nowhere or maybe I just hadn't noticed her before. A young lady with dark hair , she wore a dress that covered almost nothing and was designed that way on purpose. She leaned against the bar beside me, her elbow brushing mine, and tilted her head like she was trying to figure me out.
"Talking to yourself?" she asked. Her voice was sweet. Too sweet.
"Go away."
She didn't move.
"You've been sitting here a long time," she said, one finger tracing slowly along the rim of my glass. "All alone. That seems like such a waste."
"I said go away."
"You did." A small smile played at the corner of her lips. "I chose not to listen."
She shifted deliberately, I was sure of it and the neckline of her dress dipped low, exposing the soft swell of her chest. She didn't bother fixing it. Her eyes never left my face. She just watched me, patient, like she already knew how this ended.
I looked away and took another sip.
She leaned in until her lips were close to my ear. "You're far too handsome to be this sad," she breathed. Her fingers trailed lightly up my forearm, barely a touch. "Let me fix that."
"You can't fix anything."
"Maybe not." Her nail drew a slow line to my wrist. "But I can make you forget. Even if it's just for tonight."
I turned and looked at her with disgust. I knew exactly what she was. I knew exactly what this was.
I opened my mouth to say no.
And then the whiskey hit me — all of it, crashing over the back of my skull at once and I lost control
"Fine," I heard myself say,then we both headed to the hotel room.
The hotel room was dark, nothing but city lights bleeding soft and gold through the curtains.
I was drunk. I was broken. I was aching in a place so deep I didn't even know the name of it. And I let her. I let all of it happen because the alternative was going home to an empty chest and a face I couldn't stand to look at.
"Look at me," she breathed against my neck.
I did.
She was beautiful. I couldn't pretend otherwise.
But even as my hands gripped her waist, even as the heat crashed through me, I kept closing my eyes. Because when my eyes were closed I could pretend. I could pretend her hands felt different. That her perfume smelled different. That the voice whispering my name belonged to someone else entirely.
Elena.
I let myself fall apart.
And when it was over, I lay staring at the ceiling and I felt absolutely nothing. Just empty and hollow.
---
3:42 AM.
The red numbers on the bedside clock cut into my eyes like a blade.
I sat up slowly. The room tilted. I pressed one palm flat against the mattress and waited for the world to stop moving. Beside me, she slept peacefully and satisfied.
I pulled on my shirt and my trousers. I took out my wallet, counted out a thick fold of bills without looking at the numbers and set them on the nightstand beside the lamp.
I didn't wake her.
I didn't leave a note...I just walked out.
---
By the grace of God, I made it home.I was still drunk, I knew it, so I drove slowly.
I felt nothing anyway.
The house was lit inside when I pulled up.
Of course it was.
I pushed open the front door, and Eliza was standing in the middle of the living room in her silk robe, her arms folded across her chest, and her eyes red and furious and wet.
"Where have you been?" she snapped.
"Don't." I walked past her toward the stairs.
"Don't?" She moved in front of me. "Alexander, it is almost four in the morning! I have been calling you for hours..."
"I said don't, Eliza."
"You smell like alcohol." Her voice shook. Her eyes moved over my face, searching, and then something shifted behind them. Her nostrils flared. "And perfume. That is not my perfume, Alexander." Her breath hitched. "Did you.....were you with someone?"
I said nothing.
The silence answered for me.
She made a sound...something between a laugh and a sob, cracked right down the middle. "Then just do it," she whispered. Her voice dropped low and desperate. "Hit me. Scream at me. Hate me out loud — because this silence is killing me. You look right through me every single day like I don't exist. Like I'm not even standing in front of you."
"Eliza, I'm not..."
"Kill me!" The word tore out of her like something that had been caged too long. "Do something! Anything! Just stop looking at me like that!"
Something cracked open inside my chest.
"You want to know how I look at you?" My voice came out low. Quiet. Controlled in the way that is worse than shouting. "I look at you and I see what you did. Every single time. I look at you and I see the moment my life was destroyed — by you. Not by anyone else. By you.!!"
Her face crumpled. "Alexander, please..."
"I was supposed to marry her." The words came slowly, like I was pulling them up from somewhere deep and locked. "Elena. I was supposed to marry Elena. I loved her. I LOVE her ... right now, tonight, every morning I wake up in this house that was never supposed to be yours. I love her." My jaw tightened until it ached. "You climbed into my bed wearing her face. You lied. You schemed. And you got everything you wanted."
"I wanted you," she choked out.
"You wanted a man who doesn't exist." I spread my arms wide. "Because the man who exists? He is in love with your sister. He has been this whole time. And he will be tomorrow."
"You hate me," she whispered.
"Yes." I didn't look away. "I do."
The word knocked the breath out of her. She pressed her hand over her mouth, her shoulders shaking.
"I hate what this marriage made me," I said, quieter now, the fire burning down to something colder and sadder underneath. "I hate that I walked away from the only woman who ever made me feel like a human being because of you. Because of your lies."
I turned for the stairs.
"Alexander." She grabbed my arm. Both hands hard.
"Let go."
"Please, just listen to me..."
"*Let go of me, Eliza.*"
I pulled my arm away sharp, fast, harder than I meant and my hand caught her as I turned.
The push was not supposed to happen.
I watched it happen anyway.
She stumbled backward.
The glass coffee table caught her across the back with a sound like a gunshot.
Then she fell into the glass table as it shattered.
Blood started gushing out...it was dark and spreading, soaking through the back of her white robe, pooling slow and terrible across the floor beneath her.
"Eliza..!!!!"
I was on my knees before I even knew I had moved.
"Eliza!"
- Writer
