**Doctor’s Orders**
Chapter 56
YARA'S POV
I didn’t answer him that night.
I left Elias’s apartment before sunrise with his c*m still inside me and the word *marry* echoing in my head like a threat I wasn’t ready to face. The rule I had lived by for years—nothing is real, nothing lasts, love is just the pretty name people give to mutual destruction—felt fragile, but I wasn’t ready to watch it shatter completely. So I did what I always did when something got too close.
I disappeared.
For two weeks I ignored his calls. I threw away the flowers that kept arriving. I told Lisa I needed space and pretended the ache between my legs every time I thought about him was just residual want and not something worse. I went out. I drank. I let men look at me the way they always had. I even let on
