I don’t know how to want anything that isn’t her mouth or her voice or her fucking heartbeat pressed to mine like maybe, just maybe, we weren’t doomed from the start.
I don’t know how to survive a war when the battlefield is inside my own chest.
And I sure as hell don’t know how to walk away from a girl who tasted like the first good thing I’d had in years.
But I did.
I walked away.
And now every part of me feels like it’s dying in slow motion.
Because losing her isn’t a wound.
It’s a death.
And I did it to myself.
I’m slouched on the floor, back pressed against the cold wall, knuckles split and bleeding, breath thick with liquor and loathing, my head fogged and drowning and spinning like I’m caught in the frayed tail end of a dream I never wanted to wake from — a dream stitched together from smoke and ghosts and everything I’ve tried so fucking hard to outrun.
And then I hear it.
Soft.
Shaky.
“Dax?”
Her voice.
No.
No, fuck no.
I’ve imagined it before — too many times — in the dark, in the quiet, in the nightmares that wear her face and whisper her name like a curse I earned ten times over.
I squeeze my eyes shut. “Not now. Don’t do this to me now.”
“Dax,” she says again, closer this time. Frightened. Soft. Real.
And that word in her mouth cuts through me like a bullet wrapped in silk.
“Butterfly.”
I lift my head — and there she is.
Lit up like a sin I don’t deserve in the doorway, framed by the low amber light of the flat, the storm behind her casting restlessshadows across the hall. Her hair’s tangled from the wind, her face bare, her eyes red-rimmed like she’s been crying — but still so fucking her. Still like sunlight on a battlefield. Still the only thing that has ever looked remotely like peace.
A hoodie — my hoodie — drowns her body, sleeves dangling past her hands, hem near her knees. She clutches it closed with one fist like armour. But it’s her eyes that hurt the most.
Concern.
Not anger. Not hate. Just concern.
She drops to her knees in front of me, eyes wide and scared and searching.
“Jesus, Dax, your hand?—”
She takes my wrist gently, and I flinch — not from the pain, but from the fact that she’s touching me. Touching me like I’m not a monster. Touching me like I haven’t spent weeks proving I am.
