I should close the door. End this. Go to bed alone like I have for six years, like I will for sixty more because trust is suicide and attachment is death and the only way to survive is to need no one.
"Come in," I hear myself say instead.
He does.
The door closes behind him.
And the box is still open on my desk, and his blood is still drying under my nails, and six years is collapsing into this moment where we're both standing in my dark quarters staring at who we used to be.
"Why are you here, Dexter?"
He looks at me. Really looks. And his marks pulse with something I can't read, something complicated and tangled and probably as fucked up as what I'm feeling.
"I don't know," he says.
"That's not good enough."
"I know."
The silence stretches. I'm counting again. Seconds until I throw him out. Seconds until I do something stupid. Seconds until?—
"I saw the light under your door," he says. "Felt the echo of your emotional state. Something leaking through your walls. Something like grief."
"And you couldn't not come."
"No."
"Why?"
His jaw tightens. The muscles in his throat work.
Then: "Because I've spent six years feeling you missing from my range. And having you close again, even hating me—it's better than the silence."
The confession lands like a blade between my ribs.
I should tell him to leave. Should make this professional. Should remember that he's the man who calculated my worth in percentages and came up short.
I pick up the photograph instead.
Hold it out.
He takes it. Studies it. His thumb traces the edge where his hand rests on my shoulder.
"I remember this." His voice is rough. "Two weeks before Sigma-9."
"Two weeks before you left me."
"Yes."
He sets the photograph down. Looks at me.
And the space between us is three feet and six years and the width of a choice he'd make again.
"I loved you then," he says. "I've never stopped."
The words should mean nothing.
They mean everything.
