It just keeps going.
Thirty days.
And already I feel him slipping through my fingers.
He lies back beside me, eyes on the sky, one hand still resting on my waist like he’s anchoring me to a world he’s already half out of. I turn onto my side, watching the curve of his jaw, the shadows softening the scar beneath his temple, the one I never ask about because it feels like a question with blood on it.
“You always this dramatic in the morning?” I tease gently, the softness in my tone at odds with the grenade I’m holding between my ribs.
He doesn’t smile. Doesn’t answer. Just breathes out slowly, the exhale sounding like it hurts.
“Dax…”
“I didn’t want to go back.” His voice is low, rough, broken-glass honesty scraping across my heart. “Didn’t even plan to. But they called… and I said yes before I could think of one good reason not to.”
I bite the inside of my cheek. What am I supposed to say to that? What do you say to a man who only knows how to walk toward fire?
“Why?” I whisper.
He turns his head just enough that our eyes meet. “Because I don’t know what I am without it.”
You do.
You’re the man who touched me like I was glass and kissed me like I was sin and made me feel like the sky was something I could set alight with my bare hands.
But I don’t say that.
Instead, I let my fingers trace the thin scar at the edge of his eyebrow. “And me?” I ask quietly. “What am I in all that?”
His breath catches.
“You’re the first thing that ever made me question it.”
The words punch all the air out of me.
That isn’t a line.
It isn’t meant to be pretty.
It isn’t meant to be anything but truth.
And Dax isn’t a man who hands out truth. He swallows it, carries it, lets it weigh him down until he buckles beneath it.
“I don’t want to stop this,” I say, barely breathing. “Even if it’s a countdown.”
He closes his eyes for a moment, thumb tracing slow circles into my hip like he’s trying to carve this moment into my bones.
“I’m scared,” I whisper.
His eyes open. “Of what?”
“That you’ll go… and I won’t even be a memory.”
He blinks once. Twice. Something sharp and pained flickers.
“Butterfly,” he says, voice thick with everything he can’t articulate, “you’ve already marked me.”
And I stop breathing.
