What If It's Us Novels & Stories

Even if it killed me. ____ Vote and comment guys

LOUIS That night, after Elias had dismissed me, I couldn't help but wonder if it was all coming apart. The villa was too quiet, too far from the mess that was my life, and my mind kept spinning in circles, trying to wrap around the fact thar I was in Italy. Maybe that was the reason for my sudden boldness.

"Check out William Gavin on social media! The guy who swore he'd never get married just said he wants to tie the knot!" I was in the middle of frantically applying scar cream on my stomach when my hand froze. With trembling fingers, I quickly opened my feed. Sure enough, William had posted just five words, "I want to get married." And because of those five words, the group chat went wild. "No way! Did Whitney Spencer actually manage to convince him to marry her? Don’t tell me she’s pregnant again and using it to force his hand?"

No sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Just the quiet certainty that something had shifted, cleanly, honestly,and that maybe, just maybe, things didn’t always have to hurt to move forward.

The night before the study abroad application deadline, the class group chat blew up. [Oh my God, Ryan, why did you switch your application to the UK? Weren’t you supposed to go to France with Emma Bennett?] Ryan Hawthorne replied like it was nothing. [Yeah, I changed it. She has my login anyway.] [Once she sees it, she’ll switch too. She always follows me around. She can’t function without me.] I stood there with my phone in my hand, my mind going completely blank.

"For a year, I kept waiting for the servers to blink. For a lawyer to call. For a ledger entry to show a deficit. But there is nothing left to balance." Clara looked up, her striking eyes capturing the moonlight, holding Jillian’s gaze with a fierce, absolute transparency. "Because we don't owe the grid a single line of data, Jillian. There are no terms on the table. No fifty-thousand-dollar wire transfers. No rules about where we can touch or what we can say."

I went to the wardrobe and found a piece of clothing covered in dust. I shook the dust off and put it on without hesitation. Before long, I felt an itch on my back, near the wound. Perhaps it was infected. When I went out to buy clothes, Mark returned again. Why did he come back? To make fun of me? He thew some new clothes to me and told me to put them on. I refused; after all, he had a girlfriend. It wouldn't be right to buy clothes for another woman, right?

No, not just at me. At us.

There was a pause on the other end, then a soft intake of breath. "You're sure? If you return, you'll have to erase all traces of yourself from this world. From now on, there will be no more Ruby Randy." "I'm sure," I said. "Alright then," he replied. "I'll be waiting."

For us. And maybe… maybe that changes everything.