All Chapters of With All My Love: Chapter 31 - Chapter 36

Present ~HimA week. She'd been back for a week. Every time her name was mentioned, the hammer I held would slip from my grasp, clattering to the floor, as cold panic burned under my skin and I bolted from the room. Jesse and Sam thought I was angry, furious that she hadn't come for my mom's funeral, livid that she could just vanish and leave me in silence.But what I felt wasn’t anger. It was something rawer, sharper, buried deeper than rage. It was a hollow, gnawing ache burning through my chest. It was fear, the kind that clawed at me and rippled through every nerve. A gnawing, unyielding dread that left me cold.Terror clawed at my insides. I imagined what her voice would do to me, how my name on her tongue would reopen every wound rather than heal it.Because deep down, I knew myself too well. One second in her presence, just one, and every need I'd forced underground, every ache and raw longing, every shattered, desperate part of me that had never really stopped belonging to her

Past The muted glow of the TV cast soft shadows in the dim room as the voices from the Titanic movie faded into an indistinct murmur. Patrick’s space was a sanctuary from the November chill, the curtains tightly drawn, and a small heater buzzed gently in the corner, a constant, comforting presence. Together on his bed, they lay intertwined under a shared blanket, a cocoon of warmth and whispers. Annabelle rested her head on his chest, breathing a soft, steady rhythm against his skin. His fingers traced absentminded patterns on her back, the simple touch a language all its own. It was four days since his birthday, marking five months of their secret relationship. Under the blanket, in their sanctuary away from the world, he told her she was his brightest light. Time seemed to pause as they exchanged stolen kisses and invisible promises finally out in the open, unbroken by the world outside.Annabelle shifted against him, straddling his lap so she could see him properly. His hands sett

Present~Him I tell myself I don’t care. I’ve been telling myself that for five years. The phrase has become a mantra, a shield, something I repeat until the edges of my own conviction start to fray. If I say it often enough, maybe I'll finally believe it’s true. Maybe I'll feel nothing at all. Maybe the past will finally become a ghost and not a living thing that haunts me every night.But then she walks in, and the air crackles. The whole room seems to tilt toward her, a silent, invisible force pulling everything in her orbit. My heart, a traitorous muscle, starts to pound a frantic, desperate rhythm against my ribs.I sense her before I see her. I sense her before I hear that laugh, soft and familiar, a sound that once belonged to me, that I had coaxed from her on so many lazy afternoons. I feel the warmth of her presence even from across the room, an ember rekindled into a blaze that threatens to consume me. The memory of that laugh—the way her shoulders would shake with it, the w