Chapter 1: A nightmare to remember.
I always knew Sarah Torres was out of my league.
That wasn’t self-pity talking it was just fact. She was a 5’9" beauty with the kind of body that made men forget their names: thick in all the right places, a face that could stop traffic, long chestnut hair she wore like a weapon. The type of woman who had three backup options on standby at any given moment. The type who had never once paid for her own drink in her life.
And I was Xavier Cole. Twenty-four years old. Five-foot-six. Pizza delivery guy. The man who’d spent the better part of his adult life perfecting the art of being invisible to women.
So yeah. I knew.
Still didn’t stop me from spending eighteen months pouring everything I had into loving her right.
CRASHHH!!!.
I heard a loud unpleasant sound coming out from my living room and behold it was the demise of my TV — the $2,500 Samsung Oled TV I’d saved eight months of tips and salary to buy hit the hardwood floor in a shower of glass and cracked pixels. Then came the table. Then the sound I’d probably hear in nightmares for the rest of my life: the hollow thud of my PS5 Pro bouncing off the wall.
Sarah stood in the middle of my living room like a storm that had found its shape. Her chest heaving, eyes opened wild. Mascara cutting tracks down both cheeks. She was still beautiful. That was the worst part — she was absolutely destroying my life and she still looked like she’d just stepped off a runway.
"I loved you from my heart," she screamed, "and all you used to repay me was cheating!"
"I didn’t cheat".xavier said in a condescending tone whoever set you up with this is a fucking devil.
The thought arrived calm and quiet inside my skull, the way thoughts do when a man is too tired to shout them. I hadn’t cheated. Wouldn’t even know how — I’d spent the last year working doubles on my delivery job just to keep up with her lifestyle. When exactly was I supposed to find the time?
But her friend Destiny had seen me hug a female coworker in a parking lot. Destiny, who had hated me since the day we met. Destiny, who had whispered in Sarah’s ear every month for a year that she could do better.
Here we were.
"I settled for you!" Sarah continued, sweeping a hand across the shelf and sending my collection of figures crashing.
"I had multiple options , multiple and I chose you. What did I get in return?" She laughed, and it was an ugly sound, nothing like the laugh I’d fallen in love with.
"Disgrace. A broke, shrimpy little man I lowered my standards for."
I looked at the ruins of my living room.
The TV. The console. The shelf.
Combined, somewhere around four thousand dollars. Money I’d earned delivering pizzas in the rain, in the cold, on nights I should’ve been sleeping. Money I’d chosen to spend on building a home she could feel comfortable in because I knew — knew — I couldn’t compete on looks or height or clout. All I had was effort. All I ever had was effort.
I always suspected you never loved me.
The thought came and went like a trance. Just a quiet, exhausted truth settling into my chest like sediment.
Even with everything the reputation that followed her from campus, the exes who’d warned me with their eyes when they saw us together, the nights she came home late smelling like someone else’s cologne and explaining it away so smoothly I’d almost believed her even with all of it, I’d accepted her. Because I’d wanted to believe that love was enough. That being consistent was enough. That being good was enough.
"Lowly scum You’re not even worth the breath I’m wasting we’re done," Sarah spat, grabbing her bag. "Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic."
Bam!
The door slammed.
The apartment went quiet.
I stood there for a long moment, just standing still then moving in circles on intervals gnashing my teeth hard.
Somewhere in the wreckage, a piece of broken screen flickered once before going dark — and without thinking, I crouched down, reaching toward it like some part of me still wanted to salvage something. The shard caught the side of my palm before I could pull back. A clean, sharp sting.
I looked at the cut. Blood welled up slow and steady, dripping onto the white fabric of my shorts, blooming into a dark red stain I’d probably never get out.
Funny.
That’s the most I’ve felt all evening.
I hadn’t flinched. Hadn’t even noticed it until I saw the blood. Four years building my confidence brick by brick to ask that woman out, eighteen months pouring every quiet, earnest piece of myself into loving her right and somewhere along the way I’d apparently stopped being able to keep things in the right order. The cut on my hand was atleast clearly Honest. It told me exactly what it was.
The pain Sarah left behind didn’t have the decency to do the same. It just sat there in my chest, heavy and shapeless, the kind that doesn’t bleed so you can’t even point to it and say there. That’s where it hurts.
Physical pain, at least, had the courtesy to be real.
Three hours later I was at a convenience store with $43 in my account, the last cash I had. Everything else had gone into a micro-investment platform Sarah had convinced me to try six months ago. It’s going to 10x, Xavier. My friend made a killing on it. I’d put in $1,800. The platform had quietly collapsed two weeks ago. Gone without No recourse.
I bought the cheapest liquor they had and walked to the train station because I didn’t know where else to go the last person I thought would stick with me during hard times never rated me, I was like a disposable tissue.
The platform was empty at this hour. I sat on a bench and drank and watched the rails and thought about how twenty-four years of living had produced absolutely nothing worth pointing at. Terrible with women,Broke. A delivery rider with a ruined apartment and no television.
If I wasn’t so half-assed, I thought. If I actually had money. If I was the kind of man worth loving — maybe someone would.
The train horn announced itself in the distance.
I stood. I don’t know why I stood — I didn’t have a destination. Maybe I just needed to feel like I was going somewhere.
My foot caught the edge of the platform.
The world tilted and everything forward occurred in slow motion.
And in the half-second between standing and falling, my entire life unspooled in front of me with startling clarity not in flashes, but in a slow, sorrowful highlight reel of every moment I’d been too afraid, too passive, too soft to take what I wanted.
Then the rails came up to meet me.
Then in an instant I caught a glimpse of a clown-like figure beside a pillar. Maybe it was my imagination but it looked like it was laughing at my pitiful life haha I deserved this not going to lie. Following some words like stuff imprinted into my brain before I felt darkness.
...System initializing.
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