Five Years Outside Their Photos, So I Finally Walked Out Forever novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: His Bag by the Door

There was a duffel bag by the studio door, zipped shut, with a camera case on top of it.

I stopped on the threshold with Mustard on my shoulder and the stairs still creaking behind me.

Gavin had said it in a voice meant for only me, and it had followed me all afternoon.

He ran away from you once.

Elias stood at the long table, wrapping a gray hard drive in a dish towel, and he looked up and saw my face.

"It's not what you think," he said.

"What do I think?"

"That I'm leaving." He put the drive down.

"I'm taking the files out to my grandfather's lake house tonight."

"Why there?"

"Nobody has a key to it but me."

"Why tonight?"

"Because Colleen has a lawyer and a locksmith and thirty years of getting what she wants."

"And?"

"And this studio has one flimsy door." He crossed the room and stopped in front of me. "The drives go to the lake with the camera. I come back Monday."

"Why should I believe that?"

"If I were leaving, I wouldn't have packed my laptop on top of the towels."

I looked at the bag, and then at the towel, and then at the drive sitting in it.

I started to laugh, and it came out as something close to crying.

"I'm sorry," I said. "He got in my head."

"He's good at that."

"I know. I lived with him."

"I ran once," Elias said, very low. "He's right about that. I'm not going to say he isn't."

"Don't."

"I'm telling you I'm still here. That's all I've got. I'm standing in the room."

Mustard jumped off my shoulder onto the table and began investigating the drive.

I put my hands on either side of Elias's face.

He had a day of beard under my palms, and he'd gone very still.

"Lock the door," I said.

He did it without looking away from me, one hand behind him on the bolt.

I kissed him then, and it wasn't like the first time, with five years of fury in it.

It was slower, and it was mine.

I walked him backward until his legs hit the old leather chair by the window, and I pushed him down into it.

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