It was all me.
He was practically begging me to stop him. His body asked, pleaded, and then screamed in the only language he had left:Say something. Say anything. Give me permission to stop this.
And I said nothing.
I let him think I wanted it to be exactly as brutal as he was giving it. I let him believe we were both getting what we wanted.
The truth is worse. The truth is that I knew—Iknew—that one whispered word would’ve been enough for him to stop. He would’ve pulled me in his arms, pressed his forehead to mine, and kissed me with an impossible tenderness.
He would have forgiven me.
I saw it in his eyes before he stepped away. I felt it in the way his hands trembled against my skin. He was ready to forgive me, and I was too much of a coward to let him.
I would have kissed him back so hard we'd both forget how to breathe. I would have wrapped myself around him and promised things I have no right to promise and meant every single word.
Because I've fallen for him completely and irreversibly, with the kind of totality that rewrites my entire understanding of who I thought I was.
How else can this hurt so much?
Another tear escapes. Then another. And another. My body is crying without consulting me, expressing grief I haven't organized into words yet.
Outside, New York glitters without giving a flying fuck about me.
I made him break my heart for me because I didn’t have the spine to do it myself.
I press my hand to my sternum, feeling the thunder of my pulse beneath my palm, before picking myself up from the floor and stepping out of his office.
I stare down the long dark hallway, towards the bedroom door he disappeared behind.
He's on the other side of that door. Right now. Maybe collapsed against it, maybe in the shower scrubbing me off his skin, or maybe lying in a bed and wondering if the last twenty minutes were a nightmare he'll wake from.
Something sticks to my thigh, and I realize that it’s the glue thumbprint. Peeling it off and holding it up in my hand, I see that somehow, amidst our angry coupling, Slava’s print is still untouched.
I can go to him.
The thought hooks against my chest. I can walk down the hallway, press my thumb to his door, and tell him I’m sorry. That I didn’t mean for him to do these things.
I want to tell him that I love him, and that I thought this was the only way to keep him safe from loving me.
But I don’t.
We’re trapped in an impossible cycle—constantly drawing closer and lashing out just as we peel back more and more layers of the deceits around our hearts—and sooner or later, it’s going to destroy us both.
And I don’t mean destroying us both by ending in heartbreak.
I mean ending in our deaths.
His death.
And I can’t have that.
I need to end this, even as my heart screams for me not to. Not wait for him to throw me out. Not provoke him into cruelty. Not engineer another confrontation that lets me play the victim.
I need to stand up, walk out, and not come back.
The thought makes my stomach lurch with rejection. Everything in me screamsno—not yet, not without saying goodbye properly, not without one more night of pretending we're the kind of people who get happy endings.
But the people I love don't get happy endings. They get funerals and empty places at tables and photographs on altars. They get used by dangerous men who see love as nothing but another form of weakness.
