It was careful.
It didn’t scorch. It didn’t sink teeth into my spine or curl my toes or make me want to ruin everything I’d built just to taste more.
It was warm. Comforting.
And completely, utterly wrong.
There was no wildfire. No chaos. No wreckage.
Just a friend. Kissing me like he’d been waiting for years. Like this moment had been scripted in the quiet corners of his mind.
But it wasn’t in mine.
I pulled back.
And I saw it—just a flicker—in his eyes.
The hope. And then the shatter.
I stepped away too quickly. My hands fluttered uselessly near my hips, like I didn’t know where to put them. Like I didn’t know where I belonged anymore.
“Monte,” I whispered.
He didn’t say anything. Not at first.
He just looked at me. And this time, there was no warmth. Just understanding. And pain.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, this time meaning something so much worse.
He nodded once. A slow, deliberate motion.
“I know,” he said quietly. “It’s not me.”
That cracked something in me all over again. Because he deserved to be someone’s fire. Someone’s storm. Not this—this shadow of a maybe.
I shook my head. “It’s not that you’re not enough. You’re—God, Monte, you’re everything.”
“But not for you,” he said, finishing the sentence for me.
And I couldn’t argue.
Because I’d kissed him hoping to feel something. And all I felt was guilt.
He straightened his shoulders like a soldier accepting orders. His face shuttered. Not angry. Not cruel. Just—closed.
“I should go,” he said.
“Monte—”
He turned away.
And just like that, I watched the safest man I’d ever known walk out of the room I’d broken in.
I stood there alone, breath shallow, chest tight.
Because kissing Monte should have worked. Choosing him should have fixed everything.
But all it did was remind me who I wanted to kiss instead.
