IT DOESN'T FEEL RIGHT, but it's all I want at the moment. This is how I wake up every day feeling about my relationship with Abel Harper. We have grown up together before our families split apart. However, we haven't ever accepted the current dispute or wanted it to get between us. But, today I will change this particular line of thinking and end everything that has been going on secretly for five months. Fingers crossed. Changing my morning routine today has turned into an epic fail. How can I modify it? When Harper's restaurant is where I feel my true self and reminisce about my childhood. I've grown up playing hide and seek with Abel at this place, and here I have gotten my first kiss from Abel. It is where the Conners and Harpers used to party together. It is everything. So, like every morning during my school year, I walked out of home an hour earlier than school starting time to have breakfast with Abel at Harper's five-star restaurant, which it's where Abel works as a regional

  MY FEET ARE SCREAMING IN PAIN. I get to walk back home like an idiot with a bunch of Doritos packets to avoid suspicions. For the first time, I feel grateful for treating my phone as a secret piggy bank and saving money in my phone case. All I ask is punching Abel in the face for my muscle soreness and making me look like a weirdo at the store with my panda onesie pajama. Then I would regret it considerably right after because he is my handsome husband, and I helplessly love him so much. Maybe I can overlook all the jitteriness and awkwardness he has caused today only for saving me from Theresa's gut-churning movies. The house is quiet, and the lights are dim. It seems that everyone is in their rooms and getting ready for sleep. Thank God, that means I'm off the hook. I would pay anything in return for keeping this quietness and going to my rooms safely and taking a soothing warm bath.

"ZOYA WOULDN'T LIKE THIS SIDE OF YOU." I approached Ryan while crossing my arms. Reminding myself not to fly into a rage because going ballistic immediately brings a short-lived relief and impetuosity ensures no regrets.  The gentle autumnal breezes are drying my sweaty face. My body is heated under my panda onesie from speeding up to where Ryan stands. October winds are muted by his loud car stereo which is playing his Saxophone Jazz classics. Don't Blame Me by Charlie Parker. The crazy volume is breaking the usual silence of the neighborhood, making it impossible anymore to catch the barks of our neighbor's Dachshunds and his microwave ringtone. He gives me a side look, puffing heavily on his cigarette. "Excuse me?" The smokes are billowing his face. They are flowing from his mouth like they are curling up from a chimney or a

"HOW LONG WILL IT LAST THIS TIME, Sylvia? Two weeks? Four months? Ten years? The hope they take from our running souls and the eternal disappointment that they leave behind. No, no, no I won't go on this date, Sylvia. He may thinks my nose is big so I would have to contour it for the rest of our next five months of dating. Or he may call me BEAUTIFUL, text me Good mornings and good nights every day then one day he confesses me about not being over his ex. And gives me this very broken look of a patient to his therapist SCREAMING HERE I AM MOMMA FIX ME. Listen to me, something will definitely go wrong." The woman's voice is high-pitched enough to make my distracted ears notice her talk on the phone. My eyes are following her anxious walk in the corridor —walking to one side and routing back to the other — meanwhile, Alyssa is making a pillow out of my shoulder to rest her head on. Like everybody else here we're waiting. As if we're about to take a dip in the underworld, we're