“Stop,” I say again, sharper now, my pulse spiking with something I haven’t felt in years. “Harper, enough.”
She doesn’t flinch, but the tension in her shoulders tightens further, as if bracing for a blow that isn’t coming. Her breath shudders, and the silence that follows is thick enough to choke on.
I drag a hand through my hair, trying to steady myself, but the words force their way out before I find the right ones. Before I soften them. Before I can do anything but tell the truth.
“I don’t know why I did it,” I say, the admission scraping out of me with more force than I intend. My voice is low, unsteady, but honest in a way that feels dangerously close to vulnerable. “I don’t know why it happened.”
Her eyes flick up, surprise cracking through her anger for a fraction of a second.
“It was a mistake,” I continue, the words spilling too quickly now to pull them back. “I shouldn’t have…” My breath drops off, the rest of the sentence lodging somewhere between regret and something I’m not ready to name. “I shouldn’t have let it get that far.”
The air between us seems to contract, drawing tight around the confession. She stares at me like she’s trying to make sense of it, of me, but her expression shifts too quickly to pin down. Hurt flashes first. Then something quieter, more fragile, something that twists in my chest like regret slipping its blade between my ribs.
The memory of her knees bracketing my hips surges forward, the way she breathed, the heat of her hands, the moment she didn’t tell me to stop. I see it again, feel it again, and I hate how admitting it was a mistake feels like lying, even though it shouldn’t.
She exhales, shaky and uneven. The sound hits harder than any accusation she threw at me.
“A mistake,” she repeats softly, and the way her voice threads around the word makes it sound heavier than when I said it, like something inside her just pulled taut enough to snap. “Of course.”
She looks down at her hands, as if ashamed of something only she can see.
I take half a step forward before I can stop myself. “Harper, that’s not-”
But I can’t find the right ending.
Because everything I want to say is tangled inside me.
Because none of this is simple.
Because none of this was supposed to happen in the first place.
Her shoulders rise with a trembling inhale. “You don’t have to explain anything,” she murmurs, though the words shake at the edges. “Really. I understand.”
The problem is, she doesn’t.
Not even a little.
Because I didn’t pull her into my lap to humiliate her.
I didn’t circle her to play with her.
I didn’t touch her because she’s a challenge.
I touched her because something in me, something I’ve spent years burying, answered when she didn’t tell me to stop.
“I can hardly understand it myself,” I finally say, the words dragging out of me before I can stop them.
Her eyes, those impossible violet eyes she tries so hard to hide, flash, not with magic this time, but with hurt.
“Right,” she says, voice thin and brittle. “Because it was a mistake. You’ve made that abundantly clear.”
The way she spits the wordmistake, like it tastes poisonous, makes something in my chest twist sharply. She’s pulling away again, retreating behind that fortress she’s builtstone by stone long before she stepped foot into Vespera. And I did that. I put that look on her face.
“No,” I say quickly, stepping in before she folds further in on herself. “Harper, listen-”
“To what?” she snaps, quiet but scalding. “To you explaining why humiliating me was some sudden impulse you can’t explain?”
I shake my head, the words forming faster than I can shape them. “The mistake wasn’t-” My breath catches, forcing me to slow down. “The mistake was letting you believe I did it to hurt you.”
