Semua Bab Fallon’s Reid: An Arranged Contract: Bab 251 - Bab 260

~Fallon~I didn’t tell Dean.Not when he texted to say he missed me already after our last quiet dinner. Not when he held my hand on our morning walk through the park. Not even when he leaned in at the corner café and kissed me with a kind of ease that should’ve felt like peace.I didn’t tell Mia either.She would’ve known what questions to ask. The right ones. The hard ones. The ones I wasn’t ready to answer.I kept it to myself. All of it.The knock.The breathless moment at the door.The peach-colored roses now sitting silently in the corner of my apartment—tucked behind the blinds, still upright in a glass vase, still impossibly fresh like they refused to wilt before I made a decision.And the letter.Folded once. Unopened. Still sealed. Still heavy with everything I refused to read.⸻It had arrived the morning after his visit. Slipped under my door with surgical quiet. No knock this time. No explanation. Just his handwriting, unmistakable—slanted and sharp, the kind he used when

~Fallon~The envelope has lived in the same spot on my kitchen counter for three days. Unmoving. Unopened. Quietly patient in a way that feels almost cruel.Every time I walk past it, my breath catches in my throat—like it’s radiating heat. Like it knows what’s inside it could split me open in a way I’ve worked so hard to avoid.I’ve swept around it. Set mugs beside it. Almost tossed it once, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t throw away something from Reid without knowing what it held.That, maybe, is the clearest proof I’m not over him. Not the photos I haven’t deleted. Not the way my chest tightens every time I hear his name. It’s this—my complete inability to ignore him, even in paper form.I’ve come back from the island. I’ve come back to Dean. To my job. My routine. My filtered posts and curated playlists and long walks around the city trying to feel rooted again.But this letter?This letter makes everything inside me go still.⸻Tonight, I sit in silence on the kitchen stool, a

~Fallon~I didn’t sleep the night before.Not because of the letter, exactly. Not even because of Reid. It was what the letter unlocked—memories I’d sealed in glass and shelved, thinking they were safe up there, out of reach. But they weren’t. All it took was one page in his handwriting to pull everything crashing down.By sunrise, I was sitting on the edge of my bed, staring at the wall like it might give me instructions. My hands were shaking. My heart had been racing for hours.I didn’t make a plan.I just moved.I dressed in a rush—pulled on jeans and the first hoodie I grabbed, barely brushed my hair. No perfume. No makeup. No mask. I didn’t want to be beautiful today. I wanted to be real. I wanted him to see the cost of what he did to me written in my skin, in my eyes.The city was still quiet when the car pulled up. Pale light spread like fog across the street, slow and unsure. It mirrored how I felt.The lobby was chilled and silent when I walked in. A grand piano sat in the c

~Fallon~I hadn’t even changed my clothes.I stood in the middle of my apartment with the sweater still clinging to my skin like it remembered everything—his hands, his breath, the way his mouth had found mine like it was muscle memory.And maybe it was.Maybe that was the most dangerous part.Because my body hadn’t hesitated. Not even for a second.It remembered him.The way he kissed me like a confession. Like an apology. Like a promise he wasn’t sure he was allowed to make.And I let him.Worse, I kissed him back.There hadn’t been a plan when I left his hotel. Just motion. Just distance. But the moment the door closed behind me, I felt the weight of it all hit my shoulders. And now, hours later, I still hadn’t moved. I hadn’t showered. I hadn’t eaten. I’d just sat here, trying to will the memory out of my skin and failing.I buried my face in my hands, the silence closing in.Reid still lived inside me. That was the cruelest part. No matter how many miles I put between us, he was

~Fallon~It was easier to smile when there was a camera in front of me.Not because I was fine.But because I’d learned how to package pain in highlighter and lip gloss. Learned how to transform silence into strategy and grief into marketable grit.I didn’t know what healing looked like, not really. But I knew how to make it look good.My camera was perched on the tripod. The soft ring light framed me in a glow that made my eyes look clearer than they felt. My sweater was off-the-shoulder, casual but styled. Intentional. My hair was undone in the way that takes thirty minutes and four products.And I was filming.“Shade is ‘Sunset Cream,’” I said into the lens, voice smooth, calm, the edge of huskiness still left over from the night before. “Perfect for that natural, summer glow. Especially if you’re somewhere warm like I am…”I smiled. A soft one. Not the full wattage kind. The kind that said: I’m okay. No really, I am.I paused the recording. Replayed it. Nodded.My reflection in th