روايات بقلم ANGELA

Chapter 155Leon stared at the message until the words burned into his vision.Anonymous: Well well well. If it isn’t my little mouse.The nickname hit exactly the way it always did—condescending, intimate, and designed to remind him that the person on the other end had been watching longer than Leon liked to admit. He glanced around the second floor of the library. No one was close. The college students near the windows were buried in their laptops. The sleeping man hadn’t moved. Still, Leon angled the phone lower and typed with stiff fingers.Leon: Can you do it or not.The reply came fast.Anonymous: Straight to business. No ‘hello’? No ‘missed me’? I’m wounded, mouse. It’s been months. I was starting to think you’d finally grown a spine and deleted my number.Leon’s jaw tightened.Leon: I need a video taken down. Every copy. Cloud, phones, backups. It’s being used to blackmail me. Can you scrub it or not.Anonymous: Blackmail. How dramatic. Send me what you have. The file, any sti

Chapter 154Leon walked the twelve blocks to the library with the apple untouched in his hand. The skin had already warmed from his palm. He turned it over once, then again, but never brought it to his mouth. Eating felt like something that belonged to a different version of the day—one in which he had not stood in a church hallway while four girls held his future between their phones.The library was half-empty when he arrived. Sunday afternoons always were. A few college students occupied the long tables near the windows. An older man slept upright in one of the armchairs with an open newspaper across his chest. The air smelled of paper and the faint lemon cleaner the staff used on the desks. Leon chose a table in the far corner on the second floor, where the shelves of bound periodicals created a partial wall and the only camera sat too far away to read a phone screen clearly.He set the apple down. He opened his backpack. He took out a textbook he had no intention of reading and p

Chapter 153Margaret stood at the kitchen sink long after the water had run clear. The chicken and rice were finished and covered. The counters were wiped. Her hands remained under the faucet, the temperature turned cold, as if the chill could slow the thoughts moving through her. Upstairs the attic room was exactly as she had left it. The wardrobe drawer sat slightly uneven again. The T-shirt-wrapped bundle remained taped in its place. She had put everything back because she did not yet know what else to do with the knowledge.She dried her hands and leaned against the counter. The house was quiet except for the distant murmur of her husband’s voice in the study. In that quiet the past began to surface, not as a single memory but as a long chain of small moments she had filed away under safer explanations.Leon had always been a careful child.She remembered him at four, sitting on the living-room floor with a set of wooden blocks while other boys from church families raced toy cars

Chapter 152Margaret waited until the house settled into its usual Sunday afternoon quiet. Her husband had gone into the study with the door half-closed, the low murmur of his voice carrying through as he reviewed notes for the evening prayer meeting. The chicken and rice simmered on low heat. The kitchen was clean. There was nothing left that required her hands.She climbed the narrow stairs to the attic room.The door was unlocked, the way it always was. Leon never locked it; privacy had never been something the household encouraged. Margaret stepped inside and closed the door softly behind her. The air smelled faintly of laundry detergent and the cedar sachets she kept in the drawers. The single attic window let in a washed-out gray light that fell across the narrow bed, the small desk, the bookshelf stacked with textbooks and church study guides. Everything looked orderly. Everything looked like the room of a careful, obedient son.She stood still for a long moment, listening to t

Chapter 151The house felt quieter than usual when Margaret stepped through the front door. The morning service, the women’s meeting, the weight of the phone in her hand—all of it followed her inside like a second shadow. She set her purse on the small table near the entrance, slipped off her shoes, and stood for a moment in the hallway listening to the familiar settling sounds of the house. The refrigerator hummed. A floorboard creaked upstairs. Somewhere in the attic room Leon was moving around, the soft thud of his footsteps reaching her through the ceiling.She did not go up to him.Instead she walked into the kitchen, tied an apron over her navy dress, and began the ordinary work of a Sunday afternoon. The potluck at church had fed them lightly, but her husband would expect a proper meal later. She opened the refrigerator, took out chicken thighs, onions, garlic, and a handful of carrots. The knife felt steady in her hand as she began chopping. The rhythmic sound of the blade aga

Chapter 150Margaret kept the phone in her hand longer than she meant to. The chem-lab footage looped a second time, then a third, before she forced her thumb to stop it. The silence in the fellowship room pressed against her ears. No one spoke. They were waiting.She handed the device back to Helen with careful fingers, as if it might burn her.“Where did this come from, exactly?” Her voice sounded distant to her own ears.Helen locked the screen and slipped the phone into her purse. “One of the yearbook students stayed late to finish layouts. She was filming empty hallways for some project and caught the end of it through the lab doorway. She didn’t realize what she had until later. Then she sent it to a few of the girls. Olivia brought it to me yesterday. We agreed you needed to see it before anyone else did.”Patricia spoke next, her tone gentle but firm. “We know this is a shock. Leon has always been such a good boy. Quiet. Respectful. Helpful in the church. None of us wanted to

OUT IN THE OPENCYRUS POINT OF VIEWI woke up to noise, I didn’t open my eyes at first because my head was pounding and my body felt pinned, heavy, wrong, the whispers kept going anyway.“—that’s him.”“I know.”“I thought he died.”“Well obviously not.”I opened my eyes. I saw White ceiling. Hospital lights. Curtains half pulled. Two nurses standing just outside my room, angled toward each other, heads close. One of them noticed my eyes were open and stopped talking mid-word. They both looked at me like I’d caught them doing something dirty.I swallowed. My throat burned. “Morning.”Neither answered. They exchanged a look. One nodded. They walked off together and started whispering again the second they were a few steps away. My heart started racing. I lay there staring at the doorway, jaw tight, chest feeling too small.Another nurse passed by. I tried again. “Hey.”She smiled without stopping. “Morning.” Already gone. They were avoiding me. All of them. Talking around me. Like I wa

I LOVE YOUCYRUS POV.“I love Doninic ,” I say, and I don’t pause, don’t soften it, don’t give her time to brace because I’ve been bracing for years and I’m done carrying that weight alone. “I don’t love you, Stella. I never did. I tried to convince myself I could, that it would come with time, that marriage would fix something that was already broken in me, but it didn’t. It just made the lie heavier. If you need the truth stripped bare, then here it is: I've been gay my entire life. This didn’t start with him. It didn’t start last year or last month or whenever the rumors decided to crawl out of the gutter. I was born this way, and I buried it because it was easier to be the son, the husband, the partner everyone expected than to be honest.”She doesn't move at first. Just stares. Like she’s watching something collapse in slow motion and can’t look away. Her lips part, then press together again, like she’s tasting every word, weighing how much damage they’ve already done. I can se

OUT IN THE AIRCYRUS POV.I swore I’d never step foot in Festus’s house again.I said it years ago, out loud, drunk and furious and bleeding from a fight that never should’ve happened. I remember pointing at the place like it was cursed ground, telling Timone if he ever dragged me back here it’d be because I was dead or desperate. Turns out desperation counts.The door closes behind me and the sound lands wrong in my chest. Too final. Too quiet. The house smells like coffee and wood polish and something citrusy that doesn’t belong to me. Festus’s place has always felt like a territory line I wasn’t supposed to cross. Clean. Controlled. Everything I’m not right now.I stand there longer than necessary, hands shoved in my pockets, jaw tight, trying not to think about how I don’t actually have anywhere else to go.Timone notices. Of course he does. He always notices.“I’m sorry,” he says, low, careful. “I know you hate this place. I know you said you never wanted to come back here.”I le

THE GRAND PLAN Dominic I haven’t stopped moving since I got here. That’s the first thing that hits me every time I become aware of myself again. Not where I am. Not what I’ve done. Just the fact that my body refuses to settle, like if I stop, something worse will catch up to me. The room feels wrong in a Foreign hotel. Neutral colors meant to offend no one, comfort everyone, and somehow they do the opposite. Thick curtains pulled shut even though it’s still daytime. My suitcase is open on the bed, clothes half unpacked, folded and unfolded again without purpose, like my hands needed something to do so they wouldn’t reach for my phone.I pace from the window to the desk to the bed and back. Over and over. The same steps, the same path, like if I repeat it enough times it will start to make sense. My fingers twitch. My jaw aches from being clenched too long. My chest feels tight, heavy, like something is pressing inward, something that won’t let me take a full breath. I keep thinking

SILENT REMORSECYRUSA week passes and it doesn’t soften anything. It just stretches the pain thinner until it’s everywhere, like I’ve been skinned and forced to live anyway. Every hour feels the same. I don’t wake up refreshed, I just surface from one kind of numb into another. I keep thinking there should be a moment where my body realizes Doninic is gone and adjusts. It never does. It just keeps waiting, stupid and hopeful, like I trained it wrong.I stop eating first. Not deliberately. I sit in front of plates and stare at them until the smell turns my stomach. When I try to force it down, my throat closes. My body rejects it like it’s foreign. Like it doesn’t deserve to be fed when the person who mattered most to it isn’t here anymore. I tell myself I’ll eat later. Later never comes.Sleep goes next. Or maybe it goes first and I just don’t notice. I lie in bed for hours, eyes open, staring at ceilings, at corners, at nothing. My mind loops relentlessly—what I said, what he said,

JUST ONE NIGHTCYRUSThe apartment was quiet. Dominic and I sat on the couch. The TV was off. The lights were dim. The only brightness came from the city outside the window, He was sitting close to me. Close enough that our thighs touched i looked at his hand. At the lines on his palm. At the way his fingers curved slightly, relaxed."You keep looking at my hand," he said."I like your hands."He turned his head. His eyes found mine. In the low light, they looked darker than usual. Almost black."Yeah?""Yeah." I reached out and traced my finger along one of the lines. "This one means something. I forget what.""It means I'm going to live a long life.""Does it?""No. I made that up." He smiled. "But I'm going to anyway. Live a long life. With you."I felt my chest get tight. Not in a bad way. In the way that happens when someone says something so simple and so true that it knocks the air out of you."You can't promise that," I said."I know." He turned his hand over and caught mine.