The grocery lot was empty when I parked up and didn’t get out. Just sat there with my forehead against the steering wheel like I was bracing for impact that never came. My pulse thudded in my throat, slow and loud and humiliatingly alive.
I thought of David and Natalie. The way they’d trusted me to take care of Elliot when they couldn’t. The thought made my stomach turn.
What kind of man becomes the center of a grieving boy’s world and then resents the weight of it?
What kind of man feels wanted and thinks: this is dangerous — but still feels the wanting back?
I dragged myself through the store like a penance. Bought things we didn’t need just to make the trip mean something. Milk. Bread. Batteries. Like I could power myself back into being someone simpler. I couldn’t.
When I came home, he was on the couch. The green journal was open in his lap. The thing I’d given him to keep him from hurting himself. The thing that now felt like a confession I wasn’t supposed to read.
He looked up when I entered. Not hopeful. Not angry. Just present. Just there. The way you look at someone you’re quietly depending on. It made my chest tighten with something that felt too close to pride and too close to shame at the same time.
Ignoring him, I went into the kitchen and started doing things that didn’t matter. Putting groceries away. Rearranging cans in the cupboard multiple times. Wiping a counter that wasn’t dirty.
Anything to avoid standing still where he could see me. Where he could see the fracture. I could feel him behind me. Notwatching. Waiting. That was worse. Waiting meant I was the one holding the distance.
Me.
The one who had promised not to leave. The one who had said I’d stay.
“Did you get what you needed?” he asked. His voice was careful. Like he was trying not to ask for anything.
It made something twist low in my gut. “No,” I said. Then, quieter, “I didn’t need anything.”
He just nodded and accepted what I had said without question. That was the moment I hated myself the most. I turned and leaned against the counter and closed my eyes.
My hands were clenched into fists. I hadn’t noticed when that happened. My body had decided before my mind caught up.
I wasn’t restraining myself from him. I was restraining myself from becoming someone I didn’t recognize. From becoming the man who took. The man who blurred lines and called it connection.
The man who accepted being needed and confused it for being loved.
“My hands ache with everything I’ll never let them do,” I whispered.
It wasn’t poetic.
It was true.
They ached like hunger. They ached like grief. They ached like holding something too heavy for too long.
I went upstairs and locked myself in the bathroom like a coward. Sat on the edge of the tub and stared at my hands. They were steady. That terrified me more than if they had been shaking.
Because it meant this wasn’t a moment. It meant it was a want. And I didn’t trust myself with it.
His face was the only thing I saw when I closed my eyes. Not the wanting one. The hurt one. The one he hadn’t meant me to see.
It felt like I had taken something from him without touching him. Like I had made him smaller just by refusing to meet him where he stood.
I pressed my palms to my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I whispered to no one.
To him.
To David.
To the version of myself I still pretended I was.
I didn’t know how to stay without harming him. I didn’t know how to leave without breaking him. And I was starting to understand that restraint wasn’t a clean thing. It was a wound I was choosing to make instead of a different one.
