She Defended Her Junior, Then Lost Me

It was the family from the room next door, all three of them lined up in the doorway, jabbing a finger at the man and shouting. "What do you think you're doing? I already called the cops."

The man folded instantly and let go of my arm. "It was a joke." Then he ducked back into his room in a hurry.

I stood there, still shaking, staring at the door that hadn't opened. Something inside me went cold for good.

I touched my face and only then realized it was soaked with tears.

My safety hadn't been worth as much as one line from her junior. Don't bother with him.

Five years together, and it was nothing but a joke.

The mother from the family helped me up and gently wiped the tears from my face.

She shot a hard glare at the closed door. "Your friends are garbage."

I smiled bitterly to myself. She was right. Even a stranger couldn't stand it, and yet the two of them could sit behind that door, listening to me scream, without a shred of guilt.

I thanked them, and I didn't knock again.

The front desk had already told me there were no rooms, so I curled up on a couch in the hotel lobby to get through the night as best I could.

I took out my phone and started building a slideshow.

I titled it The Girlfriend Who Never Stood With Me, and I documented everything she and the junior had done.

By the time I typed the last word, the sky had gone light.

I looked up the nearby hotels.

It was peak tourist season, and everything around here was fully booked.

The earliest return ticket I'd managed to book wasn't until the day after tomorrow.

I gripped my phone, an ache sitting in my chest. If it were up to me, I wouldn't spend another minute around them.

I looked up and saw Monica and Fred coming toward me, both yawning.

Like she was doing me a favor, Monica tossed the keycard into my lap. "Here. Go get some rest."

She studied the dark circles under my eyes with a hint of mockery. "This afternoon Fred and I are going to check out some of the sights. If you'd behaved yourself last night, you wouldn't have been locked out."

I said nothing. I just stared straight at the bruises on her neck.

Before Monica could speak, Fred jumped in first. "Logan, what's with that look? Monica got a little heatstroke yesterday, so I gave her a scraping treatment. That's all."

Monica looked at me, irritated. "Can you go one whole day without being paranoid?"

I lowered my head and said coldly, "Fine."

"There's nothing going on between me and Fred, so can you stop making up—"

At my words, Monica froze.

She seemed not to have expected me to sound so flat.

Her expression turned unnatural, and her mouth opened. "Logan…"

I picked up my luggage and stood. "I'm tired. I'm going back to the room to rest."

Monica watched me walk away, and for no reason she could name, her chest felt hollow.

Maybe she really had gone too far last night.

But then she thought about how the suite had been downgraded to a twin room out of nowhere, and I hadn't said a single word to fight for it.

And she decided I'd had it coming.

She gave a careless shrug. Five years together. No matter what she did, I'd never leave her.

She put the whole thing out of her mind and went off with the junior to see every sight nearby.

I didn't go with them. I stayed in the hotel and rested for two days.

Only on the day I was set to leave did I finally set out with them to climb the mountain.

I touched the keepsake from my mother against my chest. This was the whole reason I'd come.