He shakes his head, before something in him breaks, and he blurts, “Why are you ignoring me?”
My heart fucking stops. “Blue—”
“Don’t.” He lifts his hand, cutting me off. “Don’t call me that.”
I stagger internally, my chest tightening until it hurts to breathe. “I—” I start, but I don’t know what the fuck I’m trying to say. There’s no good way to explain what I did. No excuse that makes it sound anything other than what it was in his eyes—abandonment.
Noah’s voice cracks on the next words. “You disappeared, Damien. One day, you were my best friend—my family—and the next, you were… gone. No warning. No goodbye.Nothing.”
I open my mouth again, panic clawing up my throat, but he doesn’t give me time.
“You didn’t answer my messages,” he continues, the words spilling faster now. “You didn’t call. I spent weeks thinking something happened to you. I thought maybe you were hurt, or dead, or—” He lets out a broken laugh, dragging a hand through his hair. “And when I finally realized you weren’t coming back—when your mom told me you’d gone to live with your dad—I thought it had to be my fault.”
My stomach drops… Of course, he puts the blame on himself when he was innocent in all of this.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I say immediately. “None of it was your fault.”
“Then what was it?” he snaps, his soft voice suddenly loud enough to cut through the thumping bass inside the house. “Why did you leave me?”
Because I loved you, and your homophobic piece of shit father saw it.
Because he looked at me like I was poison and told me exactly what would happen to both of us if I stayed.
Because he used my naivety to silence me.
I look at the way his mouth trembles, at the color burning high in his cheeks, at the way his whole body is braced as if it’s waiting to be hit… And every instinct in me screams to pull him close and shield him from everything that ever hurt him.
But I can’t. I have no right to comfort him when I’m the reason he’s bleeding.
“I had to go,” I say finally, and the words sound pathetic even to my own ears.
He shakes his head slowly, and I know the excuse is flimsy. “You didn’thaveto. You chose to.”
“You don’t know what happened, Noah—”
“Then tell me!” he demands, eyes wide and shining. “Tell me what the hell I did to deserve being dropped without so much as a goodbye.”
“I can’t,” I choke out.
Noah scoffs and rolls his eyes. “Of course you can’t.”
He turns away from me, shoulders tight, fists clenched at his sides as if he doesn’t know what to do with all the hurt trapped inside his small body. I watch him take one breath, then another, trying to steady himself.
That’s the part that destroys me.
The quiet signs—flexing and releasing his fingers, shoulders curling inward, rocking slightly on his heels. I still recognize all the ways he self-soothes.
I used to love those things about him. I used to watch him line up his pencils perfectly on his desk, retie his shoes three times until they felt right. It never annoyed me having to wait for him to finish his little rituals. It made my chest ache with something warm and full because I knew the world didn’t deserve how gentle he was.
“I’m not mad anymore,” he says after a long moment. “That’s not why I asked.”
“I know,” I whisper.
“I just…” He laughs, but it’s breathless. “I thought if I finally said it out loud, maybe it would stop haunting me every time you walk into a room and won’t look at me.”
I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste blood. “Blue—”
“I miss you, okay?” he says softly, turning to meet my gaze with watery eyes. I swear to god, it takes everything in me not to cross the rest of the space between us and pull him to my chest. “I know it’s stupid, but it’s true. One minute we were—” He chokes, swallows, tries again. “I don’t get it, Damien. Why are you pretending I don’t exist?”
