I sigh. “How original.”
“You like it though,” he drawls, all smug.
I glare up at him, his eyes a blinding ice-blue as his smirks deepens, both dimples ganging up on me.
“Think we could go somewhere before work?” he suddenly throws out.
I scoff. “Let me guess, your bedroom?”
He dips lower, lips too close to mine. “Well, I wouldn’t oppose…”
I duck under his arm and slip out, the door nearly catching his face as I pull it shut behind me. He only laughs, turning around to face me again.
“And where would you like to take yourfriend,Sai?” I purposefully say his name, knowing it’ll make his markings hum.
The intricate lines are on full display this morning, standing out beneath the thin black t-shirt he’s chosen. It’s barely a t-shirt. I can practically see through it… see the hard lines of his stomach and the hot light burning beneath. The same light I’ve touched…
“Coffee. That’s it.” He lifts his palms in surrender, already knowing I won’t buy his innocent suggestion. He steps closer. “I know you love that shit, and I happen to know a good coffee place.”
I’ve already had a coffee. I could easily tell him that, tell him that another so soon will mean even less sleep tonight… but I don’t. Because there’s a soft hopefulness in his gaze I can’t bring myself to kill.
He’s trying to do this right, his version of right, and it’s probably so hard for him. Knowing what he did to me, how it hurt me, how betrayed I felt.
I mustn’t be guarding my emotions as well as I thought, because his smirk begins to fall, and that hopeful light in his eyes dims.
“Unless… you don’t want to.” He shuffles his feet, shoulders slumping, his whole aura bleeding dread and… nerves. “I know I was the worst one, Red. I know.”
Hearing him repeat those words, my words, ones I spat in fury and darkness, doesn’t bring me the satisfaction or revenge I once thought it would. It’s the opposite.
Sai just stands there, looking completely hopeless. He doesn’t move closer, barely looks at me, body angled away.
When I don’t reply, he steps back.
His eyes stay lowered. “And I know I don’t deserve to ask, but I’m going to anyway.” He wets his lip, shrugs like he’s trying to hype himself. “But will you… do you think you can ever forgive me?”
Could a heart actually break? Can it fracture bit by bit? Because that’s what it feels like now.
The hopeless look on his face, the despair in his voice. I’ll do anything to soothe it.
Before I realise, I’m stepping closer. “I’m starting to,” I tell him. And I mean it. “It just takes time, Sai.”
But really, the truth is, I’ve already forgiven him.
He didn’t need to know that, not yet. But I forgave him when the ache of missing them became unbearable.
I forgave him when I saw the way he looked at me, in the meeting and every moment since, like I’ll disappear if he stopped.
I forgave him when I felt his loss—the hollow despair when he thought I was gone. Twice. That ache, that desperate need to fill it…. how he would have done anything to stop it.
He should have told me what I was to him, he shouldn’t have let our relationship evolve without the truth between us. But if the one thing that could stop that pain, that unbearable ache, was literally beneath my fingertips… would I have been strong enough to resist? To resist him?
If I’m honest, I’m no different from him, and I don’t know what that makes me.
“I’m so sorry I messed this up, Red.” He looks so breakable in that moment, and when his sad eyes finally lift to mine, another crack tears through my chest. “Say whatever you want, I can take it… just don’t send me away. Please.”
Hearing him like this, soft and broken and pleading, undoes me.
“Sai.” I edge closer, but he buries his hands in his pockets. “I wouldn’t be standing here with you, right now, if I wasn’t already starting to forgive you.”
