Yours Truly ❁ n.k.h

• chapter twenty four •

"There's only six."

These were the three words I heard in the middle of the night that made me open my eyes. Dinah was clad in a pair of grey sweats, ankle socks, and a pink hoodie. The hood was on her head and just barely shielding her messy bun.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at the floor. The room was still void of much light except the sliver that creeped in from the hallway. The most I could see was her back now.

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, turning to her voice with a slight stretch.

"What?" I groaned.

"I thought there was more, there's only six of them. The journals or whatever."

I blinked, allowing my eyes to adjust to me being awake. I didn't even say anything, I just waited for her to continue.

"I read them. You talked about me like I'm some kind of monster."

I ran my hands over my face. "I— Dinah, what are you talking about?" I mumbled.

"But eight months ago, you stopped looking at me and started looking through me, and I didn't like it... That breaks my heart more than the day I found out you were planning to leave me." She read. The papers shuffled again. "Or, I'm not gonna let you use her as a ploy to make me come home? What were you even talking about? No one was using anyone. For anything."

I tried to get the gears in my head to start working, go into overdrive, something. Right now I was running on maybe two or three hours of sleep and she was throwing fucking questions like a fastball.

"I told you some of it might make you mad. I never said I wrote nice things or pages full of apologies."

"Yeah, you said it was a start, but I didn't expect this!" She turned, putting the papers in the distance between us. I didn't even bother to touch them when I uncovered my eyes.

"Listen... You just read it for the first time. Give it a few days and if you still feel the same, we'll talk about it. Can I please just go back to sleep? My flight is in a few hours and the last few days have been a lot. I'm trying, you know, to do the right thing but I don't have the energy right now and I don't know what you want me to say."

Her brown eyes were full of steel and venom all at once. I could sense the meltdown coming from a mile away. I had every intention to dissipate things before it got there. Normally I'd be equipped to handle her mood shifts but not on two hours of sleep and especially not after the last forty eight hours I've had.

"No."

This time it was my turn to give her a blank stare. If I had the energy, I would've grilled her back. Instead, I just closed my eyes and pulled the covers closer to me. I didn't even try to antagonize her. It was clear she was in a mood to carry this conversation.

"I'm not going to wait until later, we're gonna talk now. I've been putting my feelings aside over and over and it isn't fair. You don't get to just give me this letter bullshit thinking it's gonna solve everything and you're off the hook with no real explanation. I want to know what the fuck you meant, who was using Angel against you? And who was gonna leave you?"

I made a face, trying to calm the nerves she so easily danced along. She wasn't going to make herself easy to ignore.

"Didn't I write something in the other ones? Explaining what I meant?" I quipped.