DON’T STOP (Lila and Darrell) novel Chapter 109

Chapter 109

Chapter 109

Daisy

I won’t pretend I wasn’t relieved.

腐

The moment I heard the front door close behind Steve and his two bags, something in my chest loosened that I hadn’t even realized had been wound tight. I stood in the corridor and listened to the silence of the house and exhaled slowly

It was time. It had been time for a while, if I was being honest with myself, which I was trying to get better at

I had met Steve two years ago at the lowest point of my life. The divorce from Norman had been sudden and brutal in the way that only things you never saw coming can be, and I had been quietly falling apart inside a very composed exterior when Steve had walked in. A mutual friend’s dinner party. He had been warm and attentive and genuinely kind in a way th had felt like exactly what I needed at a time when I needed something desperately. My company had been in the middle of a legal dispute with a competitor that had my lawyers billing me hourly and my board sending concerned emails at midnight. I had been running on fumes and heartbreak and sheer stubbornness.

Steve had been perfect.

For a while.

When he lost his job earlier this year, the shift had been gradual enough that I’d almost missed it. He’d moved into my place – I had allowed it, knowing somewhere quiet in the back of my mind that it wasn’t right, being kind anyway because that was easier than the conversation I didn’t want to have. In the beginning he’d more than made up for it. The house was always clean when I came home, dinner on the stove, laundry folded, the lawn looking better than it had in months. He’d taken care of everything without being asked, and I had told myself that was enough. That stability was enough. That this was what moving on looked like.

Then slowly, quietly, he had stopped.

The dishes. The laundry. The cooking. The cleaning. One by one, like small surrenders, until I was coming home from twelve-hour days to a house that looked like a student flat and a boyfriend horizontal on my sofa, watching videos and laughing at things I wasn’t invited to find funny.

I had held it in for weeks.

Today had been the last straw. Several last straws, honestly, stacked on top of each other.

I changed out of last night’s gown, pulled on a loose shirt and shorts, tied my hair up, and started on the house

It took hours.

I worked through every room methodically-the kitchen, the sitting room, and downstairs bathroom that I didn’t even want to think about. I swept and wiped and gathered the evidence of Steve’s extended occupation in bin bags that I lined up neatly by the front door. At some point I put music on just to fill the silence.

It was during the sitting room, wiping down the coffee table, that my mind drifted.

The hotel corridor. His hand around mine in the parking structure. The backseat of the car and then the hotel room and the way he had looked at me in the dark before-

I straightened up.

“Stop it,” I said out loud to the empty room. “Stop thinking about that, you perverted mind.”

I went back to wiping the table.

08:13 Fri, Jul 30

Chapter 109

55 You Rey

Two minutes later I was thinking about the balcony. His arms around me when my feet finally hit solid ground. The way he had held me without making it into anything, without saying a word-

I shook my head hard.

Then I remembered the cigarette.

Him standing below the building, that thin curl of smoke rising from his fingers, looking like someone who had been doing it for years. I frowned at the coffee table.

Norman had always hated cigarettes. Always. The smell, the habit, everything about it. He used to say it was the single most avoidable way to ruin a perfectly good suit.

When had that started?

I paused.

Then I shook my head again and kept wiping.

“Well,” I said to no one. “Who cares about that? Not my business.”

By the time I was done, the sun had moved considerably across the sky, and I was sweating through my shirt. I stood in the middle of the sitting room and looked around at the clean, ordered, quietly breathing space and felt the particular satisfaction of a job completed entirely by myself.

Then my legs gave their opinion about several hours of physical labor after a night of very little sleep, and I dropped onto the couch like something had cut my strings.

I lay there breathing at the ceiling.

Sweat at my hairline. Back aching. Feet done.

After a few minutes I peeled myself off the cushions, dragged myself upstairs, and turned on the shower.

The shower was the best decision I had made all day.

Possibly all week.

I turned the music up loud enough that it bounced off the bathroom tiles and filled every corner, and I stood under the hot water and let it work through every knot in my shoulders and my back and everywhere else that had accumulated tension over the past several days, which was, frankly, everywhere. I washed my hair twice, scrubbing from root to tip with the kind of thoroughness that felt like it was cleaning more than just hair. I worked through the shelf methodically – the body scrub. the wash, the mask that I only used when I really needed to reset, and the conditioner that took ten minutes to rinse properly.

I sang. Loudly and without apology, completely off-key, words half remembered and half invented, dancing in the small space under the shower head with my eyes closed and my hair swinging and absolutely nobody to be composed for.

Two hours.

By the time I stepped out, the bathroom was entirely steamed up, and I felt like a completely different person. I wrapped the white towel around my body, twisted a smaller one around my hair, and wiped a clear patch in the foggy mirror to look at myself.

Better. Significantly better.

I turned the music down, padded out of the bathroom, and walked through the bedroom doorway into the corridor.

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