Because I didn’t fuck her tonight.
I worshipped her.
I burned for her.
And now I’m burning with the knowledge that this fire has an ending.
Because this was never meant to last.
Because men like me aren’t built to keep good things.
Because in thirty days, I return to the dead, and she deserves more than a ghost wearing a soldier’s skin.
The stars watch us with cold indifference.
She is warm.
Glowing faintly in the moonlight, skin bare and soft as she presses against me, her leg hooked over mine like she’s already learned the shape of belonging, her fingers tracing the tattoo on my chest — the one no one touches — and I let her, because pushing her away now would feel like extinguishing the last light I have left.
“Do you regret it?” she whispers.
I turn my head. Her eyes find mine instantly, as if she’s been waiting.
“Do I look like a man who regrets having you screaming under the stars?”
Her cheeks flush, the colour blooming like something fragile and alive, and I feel it in my chest like a bruise that won’t heal.
“No,” she whispers. “But you look like a man who’s about to run.”
The truth sits in my throat like glass.
Sharp.
Unavoidable.
Cutting.
I say nothing.
She shifts upright, my shirt slipping down her arm, her lips kiss-bruised and swollen, her hair still tangled from my hands — and she is heartbreakingly beautiful, heartbreakingly hopeful, heartbreakingly brave.
“You don’t have to say anything,” she murmurs. “I just need to know if you’ll be here tomorrow.”
Tomorrow.
Thirty more of them.
Then sand.
Silence.
Heat.
War.
“I can’t promise you anything,” I say at last, the words scraping out of me. “I don’t know who I am when I’m not trying to survive.”
She nods slowly, biting her lip to steady herself. “Then just be whoever you are tonight.”
