Page 21 of Chasing After You

I didn’t want to know what he’d written. But Ineededto.

It was the need that made me feel sick.

I leaned back in the seat and stared at the ceiling. My heart had finally started to calm down, but my chest still felt tight.

I reached over slowly, deliberately, as if I moved too quickly, the paper would strike my hand like a snake. My fingertips brushed it. I flinched.

I picked it up.

I unfolded the paper how I imagine you’d diffuse a bomb. Not that I knew how to do that. But the shows and moviesalways showed it as a slow, careful, make-one-wrong-move-and-everyone-dies kind of thing. My hands creased the edges just enough to make it lie flat across my lap. Dorian’s handwriting hit me in the gut. I hadn’t seen it in years, and I still would’ve recognized it in a pile of a thousand.

I took one last breath and began to read.

Josh,

Don’t worry. All I want is for us to be a family again.

Soon.

-Dorian

I blinked at the paper, then blinked some more. My head was filled with question marks.

He…wantedme?

He wanted to be a family?

With me?

The guy who’d killed his dad and fled?

Was he serious?

Was this a trap? Some fucked up joke?

6

Dorian

Yeah, admittedly, I had fucked up.

I knew Josh’s schedule by heart, and so I had tuned into the live feed from the coffee shop a few minutes before he was set to arrive, excited to see his reaction.

But my chest ached the second I saw him standing rigidly behind the counter, eyes fixed on the folded letter I’d left. His shoulders were high with tension, jaw clenched so tight I could almost feel it in my own bones. For a long time, he didn’t move. Then, once he did, he did everything except read the letter. He cleaned, rearranged things.

When the manager he’d hired came in, Kellie, I leaned closer to the screen, watching as she walked up to him. I could read her concern in the slope of her brows, the way her hand touched hisforehead. I knew the look on Josh’s face too well—the trembling hands, the shallow breathing, the frightened eyes.

And I hated myself for causing it.

I thought the letter would be a gentler way in. No confrontation. No pressure. Just a few words to convey my intentions. But it was too much. I saw it in the way he collapsed onto the stool, in the way he had to be talked down from the ledge.

I pressed my hands to my face and exhaled slowly, trying to think.

Josh had always been sensitive, but I didn’t quite understand why he seemed so terrified of a simple letter. Didn’t he still love me?

Was he maybe scared of the possibility of Victoria’s wrath if he broke his no-contact promise? Maybe I should’ve explained in the letter that he didn’t need to worry about her anymore.

How could I approach him without pushing him further into that spiral?