That earns me the ghost of something around her mouth that might once have been a smile. It doesn’t quite make it.
“Good night, Declan,” she says.
“Night, Talia.”
She pulls the door open and slips inside. It closes with a soft thud, glass and metal and a line I’m not invited to cross.
I stay where I am.
Through the pane, I watch her cross the lobby, hit the elevator button, shift from foot to foot while she waits. She doesn’t look back.
My phone feels heavy in my palm when I pull it out.
My thumb hovers over our thread for a second. Then I type it anyway.
Me:You in?
I watch the elevator doors close on her. A slice of her blue coat. A flash of hair. Gone.
The hallway light on her floor glows through the narrow stairwell window. I stand there in the cold until it clicks off.
My phone buzzes.
Talia:In.
Same word. New weight. It settles under my ribs like a too-small bandage over a wound that’s still bleeding.
I pocket the phone and lean back against the stone wall of her dorm, letting the cold seep through my jacket. The adrenaline that carried me through the path and the argument drains out, leaving my legs shaky and my hands twitching.
My knuckles ache. Not from hitting anything. From not hitting anything.
From holding all of it back.
I flex my fingers, tape creaking. There’s no blood. No split skin. Just the memory of how easy it would have been to slam that guy harder, to feel bone give under my hand, to let the rage that lives under my sternum finally have something to break.
I don’t regret stepping in. I don’t regret scaring him.
I regret how good it felt.
How the world snapped into focus the second there was something to protect her from. How the noise in my head went instantly quiet the moment I had an enemy in front of me and her breathing behind me.
She thinks I’m steady. She thinks I’m the quiet one. The safe one.
Tonight she saw past that. Saw the part of me that parks in shadows and watches her walk, the part that keeps tabs instead of boundaries, the part that still belongs to a system that kisses me in public and calls it support.
She called me out and she’s right. I am crossing lines. I know where they are. I step over them anyway.
I close my eyes and rest the back of my head against the stone.
I’m a loaded gun, and she’s the only reason I’m pointing at anything that deserves it.
The worst part is knowing she’s starting to realize it, too. And that I still don’t know how to put the safety back on.
Chapter 18
Talia
Mybonesfeelwrong.
