Page 35 of Knot Their Safe Haven

I wasn't going back for it.

Let Knox find it later, another reminder of what he kept letting walk away.

My car waited in the empty lot, and I slumped into the driver's seat, finally allowing myself to fully break. The sobs came ugly and raw, twenty years of frustration and want and love with nowhere to go pouring out in the safety of tinted windows.

This was it. The beginning of the end of hoping.

Deep down, this could have been what forty meant—not just the biological deadline society loved to remind me about, but the emotional one too. The point where you stopped waiting for other people to be brave and started accepting that some stories didn't get happy endings.

My phone buzzed. Knox's name on the screen.

I let it ring.

Then Malcolm called.

Then a text from Adyani, somehow perfect timing despite the time difference.

All of them circling, never landing.

“I’m over it,”I whisper.“So fucking over it.”

I started the car, catching my reflection in the rearview mirror.

Makeup destroyed, eyes swollen, every year of my almost-forty existence written clearly across my face.

But underneath the exhaustion and tears, something else flickered.

Resignation.

Something had shifted in that gym, in that moment of brutal honesty with Knox. I was done begging for scraps of affection from men who claimed to love me but couldn't commit to me. Done accepting midnight visits and careful distances and love that only existed in shadows.

If they wanted me, they'd have to fight for me.

And if they didn't?

Well, maybe it was time to stop fighting for them too.

Stop fighting and hell…manifest better.

The drive home blurred past, muscle memory navigating while my mind wandered. The song that played on the radio reflected on the screen “Where Have You Been: Orchestra Remix”. It was the first time hearing the emotional rendition. Slowed and yet so dramatically telling of my circumstances, the tears came falling right at the chorus.

Where have you been all my life? All my life~

Wasn’t that the question I sought for.

The emotion my soul was begging to experience just once in our fated experience.

To be sought for. Yearned for. Craved and shown utmost devotion.

I wanted an Alpha to look at me from a distances, miles away, and yet one look would scream “where have you been all my life?”

A question that didn’t need to be spoken for the world to hear, because everyone in the room would be able to feel it.

That palpable sensation of belonging at the sight of the final puzzle piece desperate to be whole and appreciated in its entirety.

All I ever wanted…was to feel whole, too.

But as I pulled into my parking space, as I climbed the stairs to my empty apartment, as I stood under the scalding shower trying to wash away the morning's humiliation, I couldn't stop thinking about green eyes through glass.