“I’m sick of being the one who has to chase you.”
“...do you realize the irony of that?”
“It’s not the same.”
“Explain it to me,”he demands. I’m sure if I turned back right now I’d be able to see the tight muscle ticking in his jaw.
“I always came to you. I always had to initiate everything.”
“Of course you did,”he says as if it’s obvious; as if he’s surprised I even have to ask about it.“I couldn’t show up at your fucking door, no matter how much I wanted to.”
My heartbeat speeds up in a way that has nothing to do with running.“Why?”
He makes an audible sound of frustration, and my shoulders stiffen. He’s closer behind me than I realized—probably no more than twenty paces back—but he’s still not reaching out to grab me, or close the distance between us. I keep my back turned, as I wait for him to reply.
“If I pursued you at all, knowing that I could never care about you or you’d get hurt, I would be willingly endangering you. The only way I could justify any of this to myself was by making sure it was always your choice, but don’t for one second think that I wasn’t lying awake every night for two fucking years hoping you’d knock.”
My chest constricts and I suck in a startled breath, but I still don’t turn back.“But you didn’t want more.”
“Of course I did, but I couldn’t risk you like that.”
“No, not then. Now. Just now you told me you like how things are.”
“I do,”he replies, with clear confusion.
“Meaning you like our relationship the way it is. Casual.”
He growls loudly enough to make the hair on the back of my neck stand up.“This isn’t fucking casual. It never has been.”
I bite back a whimper.“It wasn’t? What about when I came to your room and you weren’t there?”
“When?”he demands, sharply.
“I don’t know, there was that night I fell asleep in your room and there was another time before that. My birthday last year. I knocked on your door and you weren’t there.”
He pauses for a second, as if thinking.“It was the full moon. I was out running. You thought I was, what? Finding some woman at the pub?”
“Don’t act like it’s so impossible. You could have. Women look at you all the time, and you never promised me anything.”
He lets out a bitter laugh.
“Don’t laugh at me,”I retort.
“I’m not. It’s just…all of this. As if there could be any other women, when all I ever think about is you. I thought you knew that. I thought it was fucking obvious that I was possibly the most selfish man imaginable, because I truly believed that if I loved you then you would get hurt, and yet, I’ve loved you for two fucking years, and it didn’t even matter.”
“Two years?”I echo, more confused than ever.
“That’s why I realized I must not be bound anymore—that it must have broken when I was sent to Dyaspora—because I’ve loved you for two fucking years, and nothing bad ever happened. Unless you count all the agony it caused me to pretend I didn’t care. And now, it turns out I did a better job pushing you away than I thought I did, because you think all I want is to fuck you. There’s nothing to do but laugh, because if I think about it too hard I’m going to have to throw myself on my own sword.”
My breath catches in my throat. I’m stunned into silence, partly because he wasn’t lying all those weeks ago when he said he finds it easier to talk mind-to-mind, but that realization is nothing to the words that keep ringing through my head:Two years.
I stop walking, coming to a halt in the center of a ring of dark trees. The sun has fully disappeared, and I can barely see anything in front of me.
I feel Fox walk up behind me. He gets close enough to touch me, but doesn’t, the warmth of his skin radiating against my back as we stand inches apart, but completely separate.
“You know, as fucked as all this is, there’s one thing that keeps me from thinking it was entirely pointless.”
“What?”
