His eyes open, blue and endless and full of ghosts.
And I hear myself say it — the question that’s been choking me since the moment we fell into each other again.
I swallow. “Are you going to leave again?”
The words spill out before I can stop them, my voice too small, too cracked, too honest. The question hangs there between us — the fear, the history, the ache — and I hate that it’s me who breaks the quiet first.
He doesn’t answer straight away.
And that silence?
It fucking kills me.
Cold creeps up my spine despite the heat of his body still pressed against mine. I start to pull back, shame rising like a tide I can’t outrun. “It’s fine. You don’t owe me anything. I get it, really?—”
“Stop.”
His voice slices clean through the spiral, sharp as a command, soft as a plea.
He cups my jaw with a trembling hand and forces me to look at him — really look — and there’s something new in his eyes. Something fragile. Something raw. Regret sits there like a bruise. Longing like a confession he’s terrified to make. A softness I don’t think he lets anyone else see.
“I should never have left you in that club,” he says quietly, each word weighted, deliberate. “I shouldn’t have let you walk away.”
My breath stutters.
His thumb drags along my lower lip, slow and careful, like he’s memorising the shape of it. “I’m not good at this. Any of this. But I’m here now, and I’m trying, Butterfly. You have no idea how fucking hard I’m trying.”
God.
His words slide into the cracks I didn’t know were still open, filling every wound I pretended had healed.
“I just…” My voice wavers. “I don’t want to be another thing you leave behind.”
He pulls me into his chest like he can protect me from even that thought, like the idea of letting me go hurts him as much as it hurts me.
“You won’t be.”
He kisses my temple.
Then my cheek.
Then my mouth.
“You’re the first thing I want to keep.”
And fuck — that ruins me.
I bury my face in the warm, sweat-damp crook of his neck and breathe him in, letting myself believe it, letting myself pretend, just for this moment, that he means it in every way a man can mean something. His arms tighten around me like he wishes he could fuse us together, like being inside me isn’t close enough.
And I could stay here — God, I could stay here forever — wrapped up in him, wrapped up in this impossible tenderness he doesn’t even realise he’s capable of.
But beneath all of it — beneath the heat and the heartbeat and the quiet — there’s a clock ticking.
Loud.
Merciless.
Because he’s leaving in thirty days.
