“This isn’t fair,” I whisper, and the words taste like blood and heartbreak.
He nods slowly, jaw tight.
“I don’t know how to do this.How to just leave you.”
“You’re choosing yourself.”I say.“There’s a difference.”
“Is there?Because it feels like I’m ripping myself in half.”
“That just means it matters.”I whisper.“It meanswematter.”
He laughs, broken and quiet.
“Fuck,” he exhales, forehead dropping briefly to mine.“Nora, I don’t want to go.”
“I know.”The word comes out tired, cracked.“I hate that timing is everything—and ours is all wrong.”
“Yeah.”A beat.
His hands come up slowly, like he’s asking permission even now.They frame my face, warm and steady—no tremor this time.His thumbs brush just beneath my eyes, soft, familiar, like he’s memorising me in pieces.
“Hey,” he murmurs.“Look at me.”
I do and for a second the world narrows to this—his eyes, the space between us, the almost.
“You know I’m not great at… saying things,” he says, a crooked half-smile flickering and fading.“But there’s this story I heard once.It’s a Japanese legend.”
I nod, breathing him in.
“They say the sun and the moon were in love.”He shrugs slightly, like he doesn’t want to oversell it.“But they keep missing each other and never meet because they’re never meant to be in the same sky.”
His thumb traces my jaw, slow, absent-minded.It’s intimate in all the right ways.
“That’s why God created the eclipse.”He says quietly.“It’s the one moment they’re allowed to meet.Just long enough for the world to notice.Long enough to prove it was real.”
His forehead rests against mine again, breath warm, uneven.
“Guess I like the idea that some things don’t have to last forever to be true.That just because it hurts doesn’t mean it was a mistake.”
My hands curl into the fabric of his shirt like I might anchor him here if I hold on tight enough.
“We were real,” I say.
He nods once.“Yeah.We were.”
And for a heartbeat—just one—we stay like that.Close enough to feel the echo of what we were, then what we became and what we’ll always be.
He pulls back, gently like letting go is the hardest thing he’s ever learned to do.
I could beg him to stay.
I could be selfish.
But love that asks someone to drown with you isn’t love—it’s fear.
“Maybe that’s it,” I say.“Maybe we just found forever at the wrong time.”
“In every other universe where we get to start clean—we would have made it.”He murmurs.
