Page 46

“Lan.” A wide smile faked my lips. “You can’t possibly be serious, right?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because…” I laughed dryly. “Because we can’t get married now, Lan.”

“You’re…” He paused like he couldn’t believe it. “You’re saying no?”

“Not exactly,” I reply in a much brighter tone, given the thick tension swirling between us. “I’m just saying not now. We arestill so young, Lan. I just turned twenty, and we have an album coming out in weeks and a world tour after that. We don’t have the time right now.”

Lan frowned. “Katy, when have our jobs ever come between us?”

“It hasn’t, and it’s not. That’s not what I’m trying to say,” I firmed with an air of ignorance. “I’m just saying I don’t want to get married now.”

His face fell as he rose to his feet. “You don’t want to marry me?”

“Hmm,” I mumbled, tugging the ring off my finger. “I can’t have this. Not now. Maybe after we are actually settled in our jobs. Get a home and make enough money. Like in five, six years. Maybe then you can buy me a big enough ring that I can wear. Not something small like this.”

My throat soured from saying those words as I dropped it into his palm.

Lan gave me the stiffest nod, distraught clear in his eyes. Like I had taken his heart out and stomped it with the heel of my spiky shoes over and over again. But what if I told him that doing this made me feel the same way? If not worse.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked in a voice I didn’t recognize.

My eyes landed on the ring he held, and I gave a nonchalant shrug.

He choked out an empty laugh, his eyes on the ring he was spinning between his fingers. “Guess I’ll just throw it. It’s useless anyway.”

He spun around and hurled it across the sky.

My eyes followed the trajectory, and somehow, it felt like that ring was my heart instead. Flung away, landing nowhere—lost in deep soil.

“I think I’m going to the party the guys are at. Might be home late. Don’t wait up,” Lan muttered, not even meeting my eyes as he stormed away.

I knew he was too sad, too broken to even lash out at me.

But I was more than broken, though. I was just pieces stuck together with practiced smiles and a curated self-manifesto.

I didn’t know how long I stood there. It must have been minutes or maybe even hours since his back disappeared down the path. But my feet stayed rooted.

Frozen like someone clicked pause on my life.

My legs didn’t hurt, my muscles didn’t throb, my bones didn’t ache so I just stood there.

A fat drop of rain landed right on my cheek, cold like my insides. Soon, the world around me was a blur as the rain raged faster and faster and broke the clouds in the sky, accompanied by lightning and thunder that wrecked the sky.

I didn’t know when it happened, but it did. The first tear rolled out my cheek, burning the path in its wake, but then another followed, and then another and then another, and soon it was too much to keep count. The burn intensified, lacing with the cold rain droplets. But my tears never stopped.

Suddenly, I felt them blazing and warming my cold insides. Not the kind of warmth you want to feel by the fireplace but like an incinerating inferno burning you alive.

It hurt, the more it burned, the more it hurt.

Everywhere.

It hurt everywhere.

A sob ripped through my throat, muffling the sound of the pelting rain.

It was loud and cathartic.