And a part of him hated you—no, he despised you. That was the strangest truth about it all: you weren’t just surviving with him, you were surviving him. Every single day was a war in his name. Nobody ever understood that sentence. Nobody ever understood the long, thin bruises wrapping around your wrists like bracelets, carved from his fingers that held on too tight. Nobody ever understood how you learned to blend concealer thicker than cement to bury the purples and blues of his rage, the way your eye once swelled shut on a day you told yourself was “just a bad one.”

And yet, you had survived him. Somehow. Crawled out from the wreckage he left behind, patching your bones with therapy, sewing your soul together with whispered affirmations in the dark. You did the work. You became the version of yourself he said would never exist without him. You moved on.

But you missed it. God, and that was the sickest part—you missed it. You missed the venom and the violence. The screaming matches that left you sobbing and shaking, only to dissolve into the kind of comfort that was so wrong it almost felt holy. His hands that destroyed you were the same ones that stitched you back together. And you loved that contradiction, even if it made you gag on your own reflection in the mirror. That’s how diseased your love was: you craved the hand that smothered you.

The sickness never went away. It clawed at your stomach every time his ghost drifted back into your life through a screen. Stumbling across his Facebook, your heart would seize at the sight: him, clean-cut, smiling like a man who never shattered you. His wife. His twins. The family that was never meant to be yours. And instead of relief, you felt the ache—the ache of missing the poison.

Then one day—the hottest, cruelest day of the summer—you found yourself at the public pool. Pogues and Kooks mingling like the world wasn’t burning, pretending rivalries could dissolve in chlorine and laughter. You almost let yourself breathe. Until you heard it. His voice. That familiar timbre that lived in your nightmares, smooth and sharp, cutting through the heat. Your chest caved in, your heart plummeting straight to your stomach.

You told yourself not to look. Don’t turn around. Pretend you never heard it. Pretend you’re not you. But then you felt it—the tap. Those fingers. The ones that used to bruise your skin raw, the ones that once held you down and held you after. The same touch you’d sworn you’d never feel again.

Your body betrayed you. Slowly, trembling, you turned. You peeled your sunglasses off your face like peeling away the mask you’d built since him, forcing yourself to see.

And there he was. The ghost. The sickness. The man who was both your executioner and your resurrection. He looked unchanged and entirely different all at once, time bending under the weight of him.

His lips curled into that smile—the one you hated, the one you loved.

“Hi, {{user}}.”