Page 9 of His To Erase

Ani

After back-to-back shifts all week—library all morning, bar all night—my body’s a tangled mess of exhaustion, and my muscles ache in ways that only come from being on my feet for too long, dealing with too many people, and pretending I don’t want to strangle half of them.

And yet—I’m still awake.

I’m laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, too wired, too restless, and far too distracted for something like sleep to take me.

I’ve seen him twice this week.

Tattoo Man. Still nameless. Still unreadable.

He’s made himself comfortable in the bar—showing up late, lingering even later, ordering whiskey and watching me like I’m something worth figuring out.

We talk, if you can call it that. Mostly, it’s arguing in the kind of way that makes my pulse do things I pretend not to notice.

Tonight, he showed up with takeout from my favorite place—the hole-in-the-wall spot around the corner. It’s the kind of place you guard with your life so it doesn’t get popular, but still feel morally obligated to brag about like a well-earned personality trait.

And this fucker walks in holding a take-out container like it’s no big deal. With a twice-baked potato.

He brought my order.

Something about that pissed me off more than it should have, because what are the chances?

Then he took a bite.

And fuck me if it wasn’t downright disrespectful how hot it was watching him.

That’s my comfort food and this motherfucker had the audacity to take two bites and push the container away like he was bored. Like my holy grail of post-shitty-day indulgence was a mild inconvenience.

I wanted to stab him.

Twice.

He offered it to me and I could’ve strangled him then too. Or dropped to my knees and let him feed it to me in a way that would’ve made everyone else in here extremely uncomfortable.

Honestly, it could’ve gone either way.

Later, when I passed his table to offer a refill, he barely looked up from his phone.

“You sure you don’t want it?” He asked, I’m sure just to prove a point.

I was starving and bitter that he was wasting the best potato in the city.

Rude.

By then, I was crashing and hangry—my stomach was hollow, my nerves were fried, and at that point, I was just trying to survive on caffeine and stubbornness, so I gave in and ate the damn thing.

I nearly moaned when I took the first bite, it was that good.

Zero regrets.

He didn’t say a word after either. He didn’t watch me, didn’t make it weird. Nothing.

Then, when the bar thinned out and the night started closing in, he stood, dropped a hundred-dollar bill on the counter, and walked out. Like it was nothing.

But here I am, still thinking about it. Thinking about him. About what he was wearing…and how he looked wearing it. Not to mention watching him take those few bites of the potato will live rent free in my mind for a while.

Fuck.

I squeeze my thighs together, rolling onto my stomach, hating myself for this. Because it wasn’t just what he did tonight—it was how he looked doing it.

The loose black Henley, with the sleeves pushed up just enough to expose his inked forearms, those thick wrists, and his strong hands. I fantasize for a solid two minutes about those hands and what they could do.

And don’t even get me started on the gray sweatpants… Who wears sweats to a bar?

That was just cruel.

Goddammit.

I need to stop thinking about him.

That’s my last thought before sleep finally drags me under. But the past has never been kind enough to let me rest.

The first crack of thunder doesn’t wake me. Neither does the rain—rattling against the windows like it’s trying to get in. Not even the wind, screaming down the alley like something feral clawing at the walls can wake me.

But the screaming does.

I jolt upright, gasping—my body tearing itself out of the dream like a man drowning, breaking the surface just to breathe.

I don’t know if the scream came out of me or it was just in my head. No one comes knocking, and there’s no concerned voices, no neighbor pounding on the wall asking if I’m okay.

So either I was silent or they just didn't care. And I honestly don’t know which one makes me feel more pathetic.

My breath shudders out, sharp and uneven as sweat clings to my skin, soaking into the sheets like a second suffocating layer of everything I keep trying to outrun.

I press the heels of my palms into my eyes—hard—but the images are still there, burned into the inside of my skull. I don’t know how long I can keep shoving those memories down before they catch up to me.

It’s too hot in here, it feels like the kind of heat that seeps into your lungs and makes it impossible to breathe. The walls feel closer than they should, and the shadows stretch in the corners like they’ve been waiting for me to break.

“You think you can just leave?”

The voice slices through the thick air, sharp and familiar, curling under my skin like it never left.

“You’re nothing without me.”

They echo louder and I gasp as the pieces slam back into place like shrapnel burrowing beneath my skin.

The words don’t hurt, not anymore. But the memory of his hands do. My spine hits a wall, the breath leaving my lungs in a silent gasp. Sometimes I wonder if running was the right choice, and then I have these moments where I remember certain things, and I know I made the right call.

Thunder rolls, shaking the world beneath me or maybe that’s just my pulse.

"I should kill you for this."

My skull was slammed against drywall, I remember the impact sending a sharp crack of lightning through my vision, and the world tilted.

The bus is the next thing I remember.

I don’t remember buying the ticket, and I don’t remember getting on, but I knew that Denver was my final destination based on the ticket in my pocket.

I just remember sitting there, staring out the window as the city blurred into nothing but streaks of light and darkness.

And here we are, months later, and I’m laying in this bed, in this apartment that still doesn’t feel like mine, surrounded by a life I haven’t let myself settle into.

I press my fingers into my thighs, forcing myself to breathe, to move, to exist in the present.

If there’s one thing I learned that night—one thing that carved itself into who I am—It’s that I will never be trapped again.

It’s getting worse. I wake up knowing I was running, and everything else is a blur. Fuzzy edges. Static. Fragments I can’t place, like someone tore up the picture and left me to guess what it used to be.

The full story never comes. Just slivers. And the second I try to hold onto them, they vanish. Slipping through my fingers like they were never mine to begin with.

The fact that I don’t remember—should terrify me.

What scares me is what I do remember. Not in perfect detail, not in a way I can lay out step by step—but in a way that lingers. The way my muscles still tense if someone raises their voice too loud, or that I still flinch at shadows that move too fast, in spaces that are too small.

I rub a hand down my face and exhale, trying to force the tension out of my shoulders.

It’s 4:13 AM. Which means it’s way too early to be awake, but too late to go back to sleep.

Not that I could if I tried.

I already know how this day’s going to go, like something’s pressing into my skin and won’t let up until I do something about it.

I think about calling Sarah, but it’s too early, and she’ll just tell me to go back to bed—which we both know isn’t happening.

So instead, I get up, shoving off the covers, and let muscle memory do the rest.

Lately, my newest obsession is the gym. It started as a distraction, a way to stay out of my head whenever I couldn’t go back to sleep. Now, it’s more than that. It’s control.

But control never lasts long.

By the time I’m starting my shift at the library, my mood is already sliding.

Too little sleep. Too much caffeine. And far too many ghosts pressing in behind my eyes.

I shelve another book harder than necessary, while silently apologizing to it.

I don’t even hear him approach.

"You for sure always look like you’re plotting something when you’re in here."

His voice cuts through the quiet like smoke curling under a locked door—soft, amused, and dangerous in all the ways I wish I didn’t recognize.

I go still while my fingers pause mid-reach, curled around the spine of a book. My pulse trips, but I don’t look. Not yet.

Not him.

Not now, when I can barely breathe through the anxiety coiled in my chest like barbed wire. I exhale through my nose, like maybe that’ll keep the emotion out of my face.

Tattoo Man.

Library Guy.

Bar Guy.

The man who cracked my ribcage open with a look and hasn’t stopped pulling pieces of me out since.

He’s leaning against the end of the aisle like the shelves were built to hold his weight. All calm menace and unbothered dominance, like he could ruin me without even raising his voice.

His long sleeves are pushed to the elbow, showing off those gloriously flexed forearms. His ink is peeking out like it’s taunting me—just enough to make my brain short-circuit, but not enough to be useful.

And the worst part is, he looks completely unbothered. Like he didn’t just light my whole body on fire by breathing in my vicinity.

Heat crawls up my spine, unwelcome and immediate. And yeah—I hate that I notice how the fabric clings to him. How he looks like he was carved from something dangerous.

And fuck me, I want him to touch me with those hands I’ve shamelessly fantasized about more than once.

His hands stay shoved in his pockets like he’s not a threat at all—while those dark eyes drag over me in slow, clinical passes like he’s tracking every breath, and every tick in my pulse I didn’t give him permission to notice.

I arch a brow, because if he’s expecting a warm welcome, he’s about to get lit on fire instead. I’m not in the fucking mood.

"Maybe I am plotting something. You should be worried."

His lips twitch slightly, like I confirmed whatever he came here already believing.

“Should I?”