The Way He Looked at Me
A cocoon made only for the people who shared my last name.
On the worst nights, when the storm was relentless, my mom would make hot chocolate. Real hot chocolate. Not powder crap milk warmed on the stove, chocolate melted into silky rivers of sweetness. We’d crowd around the coffee table on the floor, mugs steaming, spoons dunked and licked clean, the smell of cocoa clinging to our sleeves. “Chocolat,” she called it, like it was a spell, and for a few hours, the world outside didn’t exist.
Now, the rain feels different. Hostile. It doesn’t cocoon me. It drags me into the cold, pulls me back into the storm. And I can’t shake the feeling that something is waiting for me out there something da