Then Came You { a pedro pascal fanfiction }

Chapter Fourteen

A.N v short v sad

She's gone.

The morning after I fucked up for a second time, I went over to her apartment, prepared to beg, and plead and apologize profusely, whatever it took for her to forgive me. But after knocking on her door for fifteen minutes, it was clear she was either ignoring me, or she wasn't home.

Still, I hadn't thought for even a moment that she had actually left.

I texted her a long, rambling message, apologizing, and asking when I could see her. She didn't respond. Not to my texts, or calls, or pleading knocks on her door.

After a week of no contact, I was not only heartbroken, I was also worried sick. I couldn't eat, I couldn't focus on anything for more than a few, distracted minutes at a time. I spent most of my days pacing my apartment, or sitting on my couch, clutching my phone, waiting for her shuffling footsteps to start echoing up the stairs.

Nothing ever came.

I devised grotesque scenarios in my head, of the worst possible explanations. Perhaps the man that had broken into her apartment months ago had finally returned and taken her. Perhaps she had gone out for a walk and gotten hit by a car. Perhaps she had tried to take the subway to the airport to go back to San Francisco for a while and got caught in the crossfire of a shootout.

I read the news religiously, searching for any headlines that might be related to her. I was in denial, obviously. She had told me, outright, that if I tried to kiss her again and then pulled the friends card, she was done. I hadn't kept my word, but she had, she always did.

Eventually, a week and a half after the last time I'd seen her, when she stormed out of my apartment crying and screaming at me, I used her spare key to let myself into her apartment.

"Lucy?" I called out as I carefully stepped inside.

No answer.

All the furniture was there, even the dresser I'd helped her carry up the stairs all those months ago, but her things were gone. The little trinkets she kept on the coffee table, her laptop and her typewriter, her clothes, the little plate of jewelry on her bedside table. All traces of her being there... vanished.

I collapsed onto the bed, feeling like a madman as I buried my face in her pillow, begging to pick up the lingering scent of her, honey and citrus, sweet and warm and so fucking comforting. But all it smelled like was laundry detergent. Not even my laundry detergent that she normally used, either. Some cheap, perfumy stuff they stocked at the laundromat down the street.

I sat there for upwards of an hour, trembling on the bed as the gravity of the situation slowly revealed itself to me.

She was gone. She was not going to talk to me again and would never see me again if she could help it. I had broken her trust; I had broken my own boundaries and hers in a single moment of weakness that altered the course of my life immediately.

I clutched her pillow against my chest, burying my face in it and sobbing. I hadn't sobbed like that in years, ugly, bellowing cries that I'm sure they could hear on every floor below me.

It felt like someone had ripped off my arm, or dug out some vital organ, and now I was just expected to go about life without it, relearning how to eat and walk and sleep without this thing that you suddenly realize you took entirely for granted.

I'd only known Lucy for six months, not even a full six months, but she had cemented herself into my life without me even fully realizing it. She had rebuilt the foundation under my feet, stronger, and more secure than it had been even before it crumbled. And when she left, it felt like she took it with her.