Chapter Eighteen
I’m back at my apartment.
Fingers knotted in my hair, a headache throbbing across my skull, I drop against the door.
What just happened?
I can’t breathe. Out, at least; air goes in, in, damming against words, angry, stupid, smallwords.
One word.
Going around and around in my head.
Love.
Footsteps pad down the stairs.
Orok stumbles into the living room, screwing the heel of his hand into his eye, looking as exhausted as I feel. Maybe, impossibly, more.
He takes a few steps toward the kitchen before he sees me and jumps, startled. “Shit, dude, what are you doing here?”
“I… live here?”
He snorts. “Do you?”
And I suddenly can’t remember the last time I was here when it wasn’t to grab a change of clothes. Have I really been staying at Thio’s so much the past few weeks?
I’m pushing at my chest. Pushing, pushing against my sternum. Ithurts,it’s cracking in half, why can’t I hear the bone breaking? Why isn’t my body collapsing from the pain?
It isn’t pain.
Yeah, what Thio said hurt. But what this is, what I’m feeling, isn’t agony from that.
I’m in love with him.
A breath finally goes out, a grasping, frantic noise.
Orok immediately straightens. “Seb?”
“I’m in love with him,” I say out loud, testing the words. “Oh my gods. I’m in love with him.”
Orok nods soothingly. “Pretty sure you have been for a while.”
I know my eyes are bloodshot, know I look a wreck.
“Why is that a bad thing?” he asks.
Reasons clatter over themselves in their rush to get out first.
I don’t deserve it.
I’ll freak out and fuck it up.
“It isn’t,” I say instead. Imakemyself say instead.
And it forces all those reasons to evaporate like mist, like the insubstantial bullshit they always have been.
It isn’t a bad thing that I love him. Ideserveto love him.
