Arrick Carrero’s POV – Letting Sophie go.

I lay in bed staring at the ceiling of my room, I haven’t moved from this spot all night. The weight in my chest is almost holding me in place, crushing me with the pain, and I can’t stop running last night through my mind endlessly. I’m restless, torn. Scrunching my fingers in my hair like I can rip this out of my head. I want to go to her room and see her, but I can’t. I can’t get her out of my head, even though she is only feet away.

I kissed Sophie… I did more than kiss her, and it felt good, it felt right. It made me feel a thousand things about her that I can’t even begin to analyse, comprehend how to. I know that I have feelings for her, so overwhelming that it’s terrifying and I have no clue how to navigate it, without completely losing my mind. She makes me feel like I am on the edge of a precipice and one little step will send me falling to the depths. It’s the single most scary thing I have ever felt.

Her blind faith and trust that we can just come together, and I will be everything she needs and wants in life. It’s crushing and suffocating, that she has so much faith in what she thinks it will be; she has no clue about the depths of pain that come with it falling apart. How real the threat of not working is, how it will destroy us. And there is no guarantee that we won’t fall apart.

I wanted her so badly, every part of my body blocking out the niggles and doubts, despite the tidal wave of them. Natasha was the last thing on my mind – only Soph’s and that perfect face as she looked at me with those gorgeous blue eyes; that mouth that just aches to be kissed. She has no idea how much I wanted to just lose myself in her, and forget everything else around us. The pull she has always had over me. She’s like a siren who was built specifically to pull me in.

Natasha showing up and destroying all that was a slap in the face. A wake-up call. I can’t go down that road with Sophie, I have too much to lose. Everything that clouds how I feel about her, the way her family would look at me for chasing her that way. I have everyone’s trust, including hers, and it crosses so many boundaries to give into my desires. She was a child, one who needed me, needed a hero and a protector. I would be abusing so much if I let my own needs overtake all that. It would destroy what we have if it all fell apart, there would be no coming back from that and it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Natasha was distraught, her sobbing and heart-breaking almost ended me; sitting for hours with her and feeling my guilt consume me. Listening to her cry, trying to fix what I did. My head on the girl I left in my apartment the whole time and it just made it all so much worse to deal with. I just clamped down and hid inside my own head. Saying what I needed to, to get her to stop crying. To undo some of the damage I inflicted on her. I’m not someone who just destroys the heart of the girl who loves me.

Not some cheating ass hole who throws everything away, and acts so coldly. Only hours before, did I promise her, a fresh start, to fix the mess growing between us and yet there I was – moments away from picking up my best friend and making love to her. I know I would have, Sophie was willing, and I was incapable of stopping. I only saw and felt her, and in that moment – it was all that mattered to me. Pulled in by her spell and just so willing to follow her to the ends of eternity.

I hear the noise of her in the room outside and I pause, holding my breath as she does whatever she is doing out there, it makes the pain in my gut grow larger, threatening to consume me from the inside out. It sounds like she is pulling boxes, or a case and I know I should get up and help her.

I am so fucked up about this right now. I don’t even know what to do. I just lay here, tense, muscles taut and poised.

I told her I chose Natasha…. Even when I was saying it, it was like sawdust in my throat and the look on her face was ripping me apart. I couldn’t breathe, but I know it’s the right thing to do. More than just Sophie’s heart is at stake in this, and as much as it kills me right now – I know she will forgive me eventually. She’ll understand that having each other, forever, as friends… is better than an affair that could end us. I need her too much to screw everything up with sex. I need her in my life and if we cross that boundary, there is no guarantee of that.

I can hear the scraping of something heavy and I sit up, body tense, still, and aching to go to her, but something holds me back. A deep internal feeling of something that just won’t let me follow her, as though some invisible force has me gripped. My breathing gets more laboured, but yet I am still silently straining to hear her. Picturing her in my head. Torturing myself with images of her naked last night.

It’s still dark out, clock says its before six and even that little fact hurts me. She never gets up before the sun is up, it’s against everything she is. Sophie has never been an early riser, she hates mornings with a passion, so I guess this is her trying to get away from me before I get up.

I fucked us up royally last night, and the look on her face is all I can fixate on. It’s killing me to see that betrayal, that pain in those eyes I love so much. It gnaws at me like an eternal twisting slice. Every time I see her in there, looking back at me with so much disappointment, my throat constricts, and I have to fight the urge to clutch my gut. She knows how to make me bleed.

With a look.

A killing little look.

The elevator pings, she’s pressed the button to summon it and I am on my feet in a flash, needing to stop her, without thinking anymore. Panic rising inside of me, and impulsively going after her. Fear consuming me that if I let her leave, it will change everything. My head’s running one way, yet my body is taking over.

My feet freeze as I get to the door, hand on the metal handle and I can’t move. Natasha swimming in my mind, guilt eating me, the voices of those around me telling me to let this go.

Do the right thing. Be the good guy. Don’t be selfish and hurt people who love you.

I clutch my head and try like crazy to get some sense and some focus.

Instinct takes over as I hear the swoosh of the doors and I am out of the room in a flash, the only thought in my head

I run out into the open plan room and see the doors closing, she’s inside with her back to me. A pile of boxes around her feet and she looks so god damn small, and fragile. That slim little body, holding herself in her own arms, like she did the first time I ever laid eyes on her. Closed up, broken and alone.

My heart breaks at the sight of her and I am fast on my feet, running for the doors, running against the panic consuming me. Needing to just pull her out of that elevator and tell her I don’t mean any of it. To wrap her in my arms and make it all better for her, that’s my job.

That’s my soul purpose in life – to be Sophie’s healer. To take care of her.

I’m not fast enough and my voice sticks in my throat when I try to call to her, hitting the closed steel surface, seconds after it’s shut; frantically clawing at the tiny gap in the doors and getting nowhere. I hit the button manically. Over and over, willing the doors to open for me, pressing it like I might impale it through the wall, but they don’t. Like fate is trying to give me a real message, that I made my choice.

Something in my stomach is telling me this is all wrong, and try as I might to calm my breathing and the tension growing inside of me. I can’t push it away. I run back to my room, searching for my cell, searching for shoes to go after her. Manically throwing shit around as I look for it and realise I have no clue where it is. I pull on sneakers. Throw on a hooded sweater and grab my keys in a blind flash, head set on one purpose.

The elevator takes an age to reappear, hitting the button, and cursing out the fact they need more than one in this building for my fucking apartment. It’s the down side to an access via elevator only, floor. One fucking exit. I could die up here in a fire, waiting on this god damn piece of shit. Die waiting for a fucking elevator, while she could already be in a cab.

I hear my cell ringing in the apartment behind me and turn impulsively, frantic taking over, incase it’s her and manically running back, searching for the source. I spy it on the counter in the kitchen, with my wallet, and realise she must have let them there for me… after Natasha….

It’s Natasha, almost like she is reading my head right now, knowing how close I am to tearing after Sophie and sending us all back to square one.

I can’t keep doing this shit. It’s not fair on either of them. I stare at the screen and just stand still. Watching it flash, listening to the fucking, annoying as shit, ringtone, she put on there and staring at the selfie she sent me. A girl I am supposed to love, a girl I promised forever too – who loves me, who trusts me, who spent two years devoted to me.

I crumple down on the floor and take a slow deep breath, eyes straying to the elevator as it opens, and I have no clue what I should do anymore. Body unable to choose a direction and my heart just bursts and spills all over the floor. I feel like my head is about to self-implode.

Sophie deserves more. She deserves someone who knows what he wants, knows how to treat her. How to love her. She is so worth loving. She’s beautiful, smart, funny…cute as hell; yet there is a seriously addictive aura that comes with her. She’s special and she’s like no other girl I have ever met. She makes me laugh, and everything just feels better when she is here. She has a way of making me forget about all the crappy serious shit in life that drags me down. Brings me back to the fun and the light. She makes me a nicer guy to be around.

Natasha is staring back at me from the screen and I know that I have responsibilities. Duty to be a grown up about this. The girl who has been by my side for two years, devoted, adoring, patient and understanding. She puts up with so much and she never complains. Ending things to run after Sophie is the ultimate in cruelty, and betrayal, and I just can’t do it. She deserves loyalty at least. I owe that to her, and so much else.

It stops ringing and I just sit, staring, head a chaos of mess and emotions. Heart heavier than lead and the apartment just feels empty and dead.

Sophie is gone…in every way. I scan the room around me with an empty soul as I take in all the almost unnoticeable differences. Things most people would not even see. In the small things she leaves littered around, they are all gone. The trinkets, magazines, her shoes, her bags, and her eternal trail of all things unicorn, that she leaves on every surface. There is nothing here. Not even that dumb pink flower magnet she stuck on the refrigerator two years ago, when I first moved in and she claimed I had to have something pink in this house, for her. She has removed every single microscopic piece of her from my life, from every corner, shelf and surface. All that is Sophie is just gone, and my apartment looks empty and devoid of life. It hurts like hell.

This is what I deserve. This her final message to me.

All I can see is the anger in her face as she walked to that room last night, her parting words coursing through my brain, and despite the agony I feel, I know I need to leave this alone. Let her simmer and stew. Let us get used to how things are, and try to rebuild what we were. She’s angry right now, she’s hurt. But in the long run, it will be better this way.

I will get her to forgive me, and we can all go back to how things were, eventually.

I’m not choosing Natasha… I’m choosing the right thing, doing the right thing, for all of us.

I just need for my heart and soul to catch up, before it ends me.