Should keep the distance.
Should remember what I do to things I can’t bear to lose.
Instead, I go.
She pulls me down just enough that my forehead rests against hers, and for one long second, I don’t move at all because I’m too busy surviving the fact that someone is holding me while I’m this way.
“I see why you feel guilty,” she says softly. “I do. But guilt isn’t the same as blame.”
My hands come to her waist because I need somewhere to put them that isn’t around a throat or through a wall.
“It should’ve been me,” I say.
She goes rigid. “Don’t.”
“The man we lost?—”
“Don’t,” she repeats, stronger now. “I mean it.”
I swallow the next words because she’s looking at me with the glint suggesting she’ll physically fight the sentence if I finish it.
“You don’t get to decide his life meant anything more than yours,” she says. “And you don’t get to turn surviving into a moral failure.”
I stare at her.
She stares back without blinking.
“Do you know what I see?” she asks.
“What?”
“A man who is trying so hard not to become the thing that hurt people before.” Her hand slides from my jaw to my neck, fingers warm against the chain there. “A man who builta place instead of a trap. A man who stood in front of a room full of people and let them question him because burning it down would have been easier.” Her voice drops. “A man who’s terrifying when he wants to be, and still chooses restraint.”
The restraint is fraying.
Not because of her.
Because I want to deserve the way she says that.
“He’s going to keep coming,” I say.
“Then we face that.”
“You say we like you’ve already decided.”
Her mouth softens, sad and beautiful all at once. “Maybe part of me has.”
The words hit somewhere under the sternum and stay there.
I let my head drop, and she gathers me closer without making a show of it. One hand at the back of my neck now. The other splayed over my chest, right above the damage.
I don’t know how long we stand there.
Long enough for the worst of the pressure in my lungs to ease.
Long enough for the room to feel less like a cage.
When I finally speak, my voice is rough. “I don’t know how to carry this and keep you out of it.”
