My hands remain on her hips as if releasing her might make the night fracture at my feet; her touch is an anchor, a reminder that my body is still here, grounded, human, alive, and not somewhere else where sand suffocates and silence screams. And my cock is still buried deep inside her, the aftershock of it a quiet ache, a tether, a confession I didn’t mean to give her yet.
Her forehead brushes mine — soft, tentative, barely a whisper of contact — and that gentleness unravels me more thoroughly than any battle, any memory, any scream that’s ever clawed its way out of my chest.
“I should let you go,” I murmur, my voice hoarse and uneven, worn down like gravel beneath boots.
She exhales a shaky laugh, small and wounded and utterly disbelieving. “But you won’t.”
“No,” I say quietly, my lips grazing the corner of her mouth, tasting the ghost of her breath. “I fucking won’t.”
She looks at me — really looks at me — her eyes glassy, lashes damp, mascara smeared like the aftermath of a war neither of us walked away from clean, hair wild from my fingers, cheeks flushed and still glowing with the memory of what we just did beneath a sky that never cared enough to witness us until now.
And she has never looked more dangerous.
More devastating.
More painfully, undeniably mine.
“I’ve never felt anything like that,” she whispers.
“You make me forget how to breathe,” I whisper back, the truth dragging itself out of me with a raw, reluctant honesty I’ve never given anyone. “You make me forget how to leave.”
There — that flicker in her expression.
Hope.
Fear.
That fragile aching space where both live together, clinging to one another like two hands reaching over the edge.
And I hate myself for the next truth that forces its way up my throat.
“I’m not good for you, butterfly.”
She traces a line across my shoulder, her fingertips trembling, gentle enough to split me open. “You keep saying that,” she murmurs. “But you don’t stop.”
“Because I’m selfish,” I rasp, pressing my face against her neck, inhaling the warm sweetness of her skin like I’m trying to memorise the one thing that still feels real. “Because every time I tell myself to walk away, you look at me like I could be something more than the damage I’ve lived through.”
Silence falls — thick, potent, a pause heavy with words neither of us is brave enough to speak aloud.
Then, quietly, she says, “Maybe you already are.”
Fuck.
I let my head rest on her shoulder and breathe her in — not the idea of her, not the fantasy, but the real woman in front of me, warm and trembling and soft in all the places I’ve forgotten softness existed. She smells like sin and sweetness, like something that could build a home out of a man who’s only ever known collapse.
And I can’t have it.
Not with thirty days left.
Not when half of me is already back in the desert, where sunlight burns and shadows swallow and every breath feels borrowed.
So I pull out of her slowly, careful, reverent — and the separation hurts more than I thought anything still could. She watches me, lips parted, chest rising too fast, eyes soft in a way that makes something inside me collapse in on itself.
But she doesn’t speak.
Neither do I.
I lie beside her and drag her against my chest, holding her with arms that have only ever known restraint and violence, holding her like she is the only thing tethering me to the here and now, to the version of myself I wish I could stay.
