"That's not what's happening."
"Isn't it?" I set down the shirt I was folding. My hands were shaking. I hadn't noticed until now. "You leave before I wake up. You come home after I've given up waiting. You won't eat the food I make. You won't talk to me. You flinch every time I get too close."
Each word was a wound I inflicted on both of us. I watched them land, watched him absorb them, watched him stand there in the doorway with his jaw tight and his hands clenched at his sides.
"I've spent days trying to figure out what I did wrong." My voice cracked. I let it. "Trying to fix it. Trying to be less needy, less present, less everything. But nothing works. You still look at me like I'm a problem you don't know how to solve."
"Tobias..."
"I'm not stupid." The words tore out of me, ragged and raw. "I know when I'm not wanted."
He flinched. Actually flinched, like I'd hit him.
And then he was moving. Crossing the room in three steps, taking the stack of clothes from my hands and setting them aside on the dresser.
"What are you doing?"
"Stop." His voice was wrecked. Broken in a way I'd never heard. "Please. Just stop."
I looked up at him. He was close now, closer than he'd been in days, and his gray eyes were wild with something I couldn't name.
"Why?"
"Because you're wrong." The words scraped out of him. "I wasn't pushing you away because I don't want you."
I waited.
"I was pushing you away because I want you too much. And that terrifies me."
The world stopped.
Or maybe it was just my heart. Or my lungs. Or every part of me that had spent the past week dying slowly, starving for something I thought I'd never have.
"What?" The word barely escaped my lips.
"I don't do this." He was standing so close I could feel his heat, could see the pulse hammering in his throat. "I don't let people in. I don't need anyone. That's how I've survived. My whole life, that's been the rule."
"And I changed that?"
"You changed everything." His voice cracked. "The apartment. The food. The way I think about coming home. You made me want things I'd trained myself not to want."
I stared at him. This man who'd been avoiding me for days, who'd made me feel invisible, unwanted, like a burden he was too polite to discard. And all along...
"So your solution was to make me feel like nothing until I left on my own?"
He didn't deny it. "Yes. And I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry."
"That's a terrible coping mechanism."
"I know."
"I cried myself to sleep three times this week."
His face went pale. "Tobias..."
"I reorganized your entire closet by color and season because I couldn't think of anything else to do with my hands that wouldn't end with me screaming."
"I didn't..."
