I turned. The man was older than me. Not old-old. Late fifties maybe. Graying at the temples, shoulders slumped in the way of someone who had learned to carry too much alone. He nursed his drink like it was a truce, not a pleasure.
He glanced at me sideways. Not judging. Just… recognizing. Like he’d seen this exact moment play out before. Just with different faces.
“You don’t look surprised,” I said.
He huffed a quiet laugh. “That’s because I’ve been you.”
I frowned.
“Not your story,” he clarified. “Your shape. Just the outline of it. The part where you think wanting someone is the same thing as saving them.”
The words hit too close to be coincidence. “I didn’t ask to save him,” I said. Too quickly.
“No one ever does.” He took a sip of his drink. “But if you’re the one he leans on when he can’t stand, you don’t get to pretend you’re not holding him up.”
I stared at my glass. My fingers curled around the edge of the bar until the wood bit into my skin. “He’s not dependent.”
“Didn’t say he was.” His eyes stayed on his drink. “I said he leans. There’s a difference. But you feel it. That weight. That pull. The way they start to look at you like you’re gravity. Like if you moved, the whole world would tilt with you.”
My jaw tightened.
“He called you something,” the man said gently.
It wasn’t a question.
My spine went rigid. Heat climbed up my neck. “That’s not?—”
“Shame doesn’t mean wrong,” he interrupted. “It just means it touched something that mattered to you.”
Silence stretched between us.
“I left,” I said finally. “Because I thought staying would hurt him.”
The man exhaled slowly. “Or because staying would cost you.”
That landed harder than anything else.
“You think you’re the danger,” he continued. “So you become it. By disappearing. You make the thing you’re afraid of inevitable.”
I swallowed.
“I’ve been on the other side of that,” he said quietly. “You don’t protect someone by vanishing. You just teach them they were right to be afraid of needing you.”
Something inside my chest cracked. Unable to speak, I grunted and cleared my throat.
The man nodded once. “No. He probably just asked you not to leave.”
The girl on the stage turned slowly, mechanically, like something wound too tight. A man tucked a bill into the front of her G-string. She didn’t even flinch, just kept moving in her reflection.
The glass was empty before I realized I’d finished it. “You said I was confusing comfort with salvation.”
“And did you?”
That hurt. That was the one that stuck. I sucked in a shuddering lungful of shame and closed my eyes. Elliot’s beautiful face smiled back for a split second before he folded in on himself. And the horrors of the night flashed behind my eyes.
The way his voice went small. The way he apologized for needing me. The way he looked like he already believed he was too much.
My chest tightened. “He didn’t ask me to save him,” I said quietly. “He just asked me not to leave.” And I had done the one thing I was afraid of.
