If You Miss It

27. melt

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

MELT

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Five days.

Five whole days had passed with Dmitri being completely out of it, spending all his time holed up in his room, his only source of comfort (and stable interaction) being with Juno, who constantly sought out warmth in his chest, occasionally curling up into a ball on his laptop because it was that warm.

It wasn't that he was too depressed to get out of bed. He had moved past that, he wasn't in that phase of his self destruction anymore.

The past few days were more of an I'm going to bury myself in work and hope for the best kind of thing, where he just let time speed by as he worked on article after article, not leaving the room unless he needed food or water.

Sometimes, he refused to leave the room even if he needed food or water, the fear of having to face Eden and actually talk things through with her enough motivation for him to stay inside his room.

After spilling his guts out to Tariq, after crying to him about how fucked up everything was, after having a whole sob fest in the middle of the fucking park, he hadn't spoken to him, either.

It wasn't a good strategy. He knew that it wasn't. Pushing his friends, the only people who cared about him, away never worked out well in his favour.

But for now, it seemed to be working fine.

Tariq had texted him a sum total of four times in the past five days, three texts on the same day that he had dropped him home, and one the next day.

And evidently, Eden had given up on trying to get him to talk to her, since every time she said something to him, he would reply with a one word answer.

He didn't know why he was doing it. Pushing people away.

He just knew that he had to do it, because people knew too much, and as soon as people knew too much, they also knew how fucked up he was.

Eden always knew, but it was just safer if he pushed everyone out. Not just Tariq.

But today was a new day. Today was the day he had decided to go back to work to, the job that required his social skills, not the one where he spent hours typing away at a desk.

Unfortunately, going back to work also meant seeing Tariq and Trinh.

Suck it up. Deal with it.

After taking a quick shower and placing a soft kiss on Juno's head (and another, because she was the absolute light of his life), he made his way out of the house, getting into his car and leaving.

Typically, he would have driven with Trinh and Eden, they would have dropped Eden off at school first, and then, they would have gone to the coffee shop together.

Today, Trinh and Eden had already left, probably because they didn't expect him to actually leave the room to go to work.

Dmitri couldn't help but wonder what they actually thought about him. Whether they hated that he was spending his days locked in his room, that he was cooking dinner for Eden and disappearing back into his room before she could even come down to eat it, that he hadn't eaten a single meal with them in so long now.

The two of them probably despised him, and they had every right to do so. He despised himself for doing what he was doing, but it was the only way to make it work.