30
Lev
Three days without her voice, and the silence is doing things to me bullets never managed.
I don’t eat much. Sleep stopped being real after the first night. On day two, Ruslan comes by with a stack of operational files and spreads them across the table in my bedroom, but I stare straight through him until he says my name four times without an answer. Then he gathers his papers and walks out.
Even he can’t reach me right now.
I write her a letter the first morning and tear it up before the ink dries. I do it again that night. The third attempt makes it two sentences before I rip the notebook apart. None of it matters unless I say it to her face.
On the fourth night, I go to her door.
I don’t knock. There’s no point. If she wants to pretend I’m not here, knocking only gives her something to ignore. I flatten my palms against the wood and start talking.
“I’ve rehearsed this a hundred times over the last few months,” I say, keeping my voice low. “It always ends up sounding like a legal defense, and you deserve better than that.”
Nothing. No sound from the other side. No movement under the door.
“The part that matters most is the part I never said. Not the facts. You have those now. What I never told you was what it did to me, sitting across from you and knowing it. There were nights I came close. You’d say something about your father—some small detail, the way he laughed, what his hands looked like—and I’d open my mouth. Every time, I told myself I was waiting for the right moment. That was a lie I got very comfortable with.”
I rest my forehead against the door.
“The way you looked at me was the first time in my life I wasn’t being measured for what I was worth. You weren’t weighing me against what I’d cost. You looked at me like I was just a man, and I couldn’t bring myself to be the one who ended that.” My throat tightens around the next words, but I force them out anyway. “So I chose it. Every morning I woke up next to you and said nothing, I chose myself over you. I know that now.”
The door stays closed, but I keep going, desperate to get the words out now that I’ve started saying them.
“I’ve spent thirty years being useful to my father. I don’t know how to be sorry for most of it. But I know how to be sorry for this, because this is the one thing I did entirely for myself, at your expense. You never had the information you needed to decide whether I was worth it.” I step back from the door. “You deserved that choice. I took it from you. That’s what I came here to say.”
I push off the door and take one step back.
“You can hate me for every year I have left. You’d have every right. But what you gave me before this mattered more than I ever said. I’m grateful for it.”
I turn to leave just as the door opens. The sound stops me cold.
When I turn back, I realize she’s been crying. The tracks on her face are still wet, and she’s wearing a gray sleep shirt I’ve never seen before. She looks at me the way she did in the trauma bay that first night, like she already knows what she’s about to do and hates herself for it.
“Don’t,” she orders with a sob.
One word. I don’t know what it means. Don’t keep talking, don’t ask for her forgiveness, or maybe don’t kiss her because everything inside me wants to. And before I can ask, she grabs a fistful of my shirt and drags me across the threshold.
The door slams shut behind me as her mouth finds mine, and it tastes like salt and fury and the particular grief of someone who has run out of places to put what they’re carrying. I don’t reach for her. I let her drive, because if I try to take over, she’ll stop, and I can’t bear for her to stop.
She walks me backward into the room with both fists locked in my shirt, and when the backs of my knees find the chair by the window, I fall backward. She doesn’t look grateful. She looks furious, like she resents her own hands for wanting this.
She stares at me for a second with tears still drying on her cheeks. Then she drops to her knees, and I stop breathing entirely.
She gets my belt open, and I hold onto both arms of the chair because I need to put my hands somewhere that isn’t on her. This needs to be her choice. When she wraps one hand around the base of my cock and looks up at me with those red-rimmed eyes, the look on her face is anything but forgiving.
The sound that leaves my throat when her lips slide over my sensitive flesh belongs to a man who has been coming apart for four days.
She takes her time, because she always does when she’s proving a point. Long pulls with her tongue dragging along the underside, her hand working the base in a slow, twisting stroke that makes my thighs go rigid. My hands are white-knuckled on the chair arms. She pulls back to the tip, licks once across the head, and watches my stomach contract before she takes me deep again. All the way. The back of her throat.
She’s sucking on my cock like she’s trying to take something back.
“Christ,” I breathe.
“Don’t talk,” she orders against me.
