“I don’t—Dax, no, I?—”
“You don’t get it. You don’t get it, Cass. You think I’m angry because you’re leaving? I’m not. I’m angry because you won’t come back. Not whole. Not soft. Not the same girl who kissed me under the fucking stars and made me feel like I could be a person again.”
I run a hand down my face, syrup sticking to my jaw, to my fucking soul, and I just want to rip everything off me. My skin. My past. Her.
But I can’t.
Because beneath the fury?—
Is terror.
“I know what happens out there,” I whisper, and this time, it’s not rage—it’s grief. “You won’t come back with butterfly wings, Cassandra. You’ll come back with fucking shrapnel in your lungs and too many ghosts in your blood.”
She’s crying now and fuck, I hate myself for it because she doesn’t deserve my rage. She doesn’t deserve my panic but she will deserve my silence if I don’t say this now.
“I shouldn’t have touched you,” I say again, but this time—my voice cracks. “Not because I didn’t want to. But because I knew I’d fucking fall.”
She blinks, lashes wet, lips trembling.
“And now you’re going,” I finish, quieter. “And I don’t know how to do this again. I don’t know how to lose again.”
I don’t even realise I’ve backed away until my hip hits the edge of the counter.
I need to touch her.
I can’t touch her.
Because if I do, I won’t let her go.
And she’s already going.
“I won’t make it back.”
The words fall out of me like a fucking prophecy.
She shakes her head, messy and slow, like she’s refusing to hear it.
“You will, Dax. You always do?—”
“No, Cassandra,” I snap, my voice like shrapnel. “You don’t understand. I don’t mean me.”
Silence.
She blinks.
And then I see it.
That second where her lips part, but nothing comes out. Where the reality of what I mean lands between us like a fucking landmine.
“I mean you.”
I breathe it like it hurts.
Like it cuts.
Because it does.
“You think I’m scared for me? I’ve made my peace with dying. I did that years ago.” My eyes drop to the syrup still slicking her skin, sticky and gold and fucking haunting. “But you—” I meet her eyes again. “You’re not built for this.”
