Eden

“Not without Ellis,” he slurs, and his coach frowns and looks up at me.

“You Ellis?”

Somewhere in the stands, someone barks out, “slut,” but I nod anyway. “I am.”

“Will you go with him?”

I hesitate to answer. Of course I want to go with him. I want to make sure he’s okay and will make a full recovery. But I also know, that if I go and act as his support right now, I’m effectively being sucked back into his fucked-up world after I’d vowed to escape it so many times before.

“Ellis,” the coach barks at me. “You going or not?”

I glance down at Saint, who’s gazing up at me, for once in pain and looking to me for help.

My heart breaks, and I call myself a sucker as I say, “Yeah, I’m going with.”

And just like that, I’m sucked back in.