Chapter 205: _ Need To See Him
After Mateo left, I couldn’t quite place my thoughts. He did seem genuinely confused. Like he wasn’t the one who found me in the pigsty.
Like he wasn’t the one who held me in it, who wiped chicken blood from his hands before telling me I was precious. Like he hadn’t pulled the blanket over my shoulders or whispered about Axel’s secrets in the dark.
But that didn’t make sense. None of this made sense.
I stood there in the middle of the shack, dripping, towel clutched like a flag of surrender, and stared at the door like it might open again and spit out answers. It didn’t. Just creaked once in the wind before falling silent like the rest of the world.
"Rainmad," I muttered to myself. "He actually called me rainmad."
The worst part was that I couldn’t even be offended. Because maybe I was. Maybe the rain had soaked into my skull and rewired things.
Or maybe... I wrapped the towel tighter—maybe I’d spent so long being dismissed and punished and ignored that I’d started inventing kindness just to survive it.
I sunk to the floor with a squelch. My shoes still hadn’t dried, and now the wooden planks bore the damp outline of my defeat.
No. No, that wasn’t fair.
He was real.
I remembered the way he’d looked at me that night... not just looked, seen me. And I hadn’t imagined the warmth of his jacket. Or the tension in his voice when he told me I didn’t deserve what was happening. That Axel was a liar and didn’t deserve me. That I had created a fantasy in my head.