Malakai froze, eyes shooting to mine. “Why do you not believe me on this, yet you believe him? Why don’t you trust me?”
And that was the problem we kept facing. The one I had turned my back on again and again. What we’d wrecked so thoroughly, and no matter what way we spun it, how we avoided it, we could not outrun that fact.
We no longer existed on the same page. Spirits, not even in the same realm of understanding. Both too blinded by our own experiences to look at what the other needed. A wall existed that kept us from closing the distance between us.
We no longer trusted each other.
I took a deep breath, fighting the urge to tell him that if anyone had the right to rage over broken trust, it was me. I’d done nothing but trust him with my entire heart and he’d torn it to pieces.
But I didn’t want to havethatfight again.
There was a more important truth lurking here.
“Trust doesn’t exist between us.” I took a deep breath, biting my lips against the stinging in my eyes. “Not as it once did.” My voice shrank with every word. “We’re different.”
There was no coming back from those words, but I’d thrown them out into the universe, ropes dangling, stretching for a place to tether that didn’t exist.
Maybe there hadn’t been something to pull us back since the day Malakai turned his back on me over two years ago. When he made that choice, he risked our untainted love. In the years he was gone, we’d both changed.
Grown into different people. Two who didn’t fit together as we once had.
His arms fell to his sides, my words battering him with weighted blows. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying we can’t continue to deny it. I cannotlivein this—this—toxic realm of anger.” Tears broke from the corners of my eyes, falling hot and harsh, laced with vulnerability that stained the carpet between us and broke free this bottled-up truth inside of me. Rage settled in its absence—at myself for allowing us to get to this point, at Malakai for hiding from me. Each sparked within my blood. “I’m done. I have to be done because this isn’t good anymore.”
“You mean—” His eyes widened, and he swallowed, jaw ticking in time with my words echoing between us. “You’re leaving me.”
“Leaving?” I shrieked, embers of fury igniting. “That’s rich coming from you.”
“You know I didn’t want to leave!” Frustration turned his words into a roar.
“This is what I’m talking about!” I yelled, throwing my arms wide. “We always return tothisfight. The past haunts us like a vengeful ghost, and I amtiredof it. We don’t agree on anything anymore.” Exhaustion weighed down my soul, blurring my mind, and I lost track of my words. “I want to be happy—I want to move on.”
I hadn’t meant to say it, but the moment that confession left my lips, a warmth wrapped around me.Relief.
He took a deep breath, realization seeming to settle in it. “Alone.”
It wasn’t a question.
“I don’t know—” The argument died on my tongue because Ididknow. “I can’t fall back into this avoidant dance with you. We’re being reckless with our hearts, and I’m putting a stop to it.”
The words were stronger than I felt. Malakai was all I’d ever known.
But I dug into that relief, wrapped it around me like a comfort blanket. Dulled the pain pulsing off of Malakai now that the truth wasout. But that was a coward’s move. If I was going to do this, it was only fair to us both that I was honest. I shucked that blanket, let it pool around my feet and bare the ugly reality.
“I’ve tried to pick up where we left off, but the truth is, we’re different people than we once were.” We’d both been keeping secrets, burying our pain, and I knew myself. I wouldn’t stop doing that, wouldn’t start healing, if we remained.
I wiped tears from my cheeks, their stains a reminder that some things weren’t meant to be fixed. Some endings weren’t meant to be happy.
Malakai swept across the room until he was standing before me, toe to toe. I looked at his shirt. Two buttons were undone, and the third was slipping out of its fastener. I wondered if I should fix it for him. Stretch out and rehook?—
A sturdy finger touched my chin, tilting my head up, and I forgot the buttons—remembered I couldn’t fix things anymore.
The silver lining his eyes cracked my heart open further. It blurred the heartache and haunting in those irises, but…there was acceptance there, too.
He wasn’t fighting what I said because—because he knew I was right. He had probably been denying it as long as I had.
Fucking Spirits, I hated this. I hated the constant pain we both lived in.
