He winces when my hands settle.
It’s small, but I feel it. A hitch in his breath. A brief tightening in the muscles under my palms. The contact hurts him in ways I can’t see.
“It makes me forget how afraid I am of it,” he says.
I stop fighting.
Not because I forgive him. Not because the anger leaves. But because suddenly I can feel his heartbeat against my hands, hard and uneven. There is too much truth in the room for me to keep pretending this is only about rage.
He looks at me like he hates himself for saying any of this and can’t stop now that he’s started.
“It makes me remember,” he continues, voice lower now, “that when you touch me, you’re not trying to take.”
My throat tightens.
His eyes move over my face, searching for something, maybe punishment, maybe mercy.
“There’s no hatred in your eyes when your hands are on me,” he says. “Even now. Even now, when you should hate me.”
The words hit harder than any insult could have.
Because I probably should hate him.
For the car. For the kitchen. For the silence. For the way he keeps slicing me open with honesty only after he’s already hurt me. For the fact that every time I get close to deciding he is monstrous, he says something that makes the monster look too much like a wound.
My fingers curl instinctively against his chest. Not enough to hurt him. Just enough to prove that I’m still there, still touching him, even after everything.
And that seems to undo him more than if I’d slapped him.
His lashes lower for a second. His mouth parts slightly, not in seduction this time, but in the kind of breathless disbelief that makes him look younger. Less dangerous. More lost.
The room is silent except for both of us breathing too hard.
When he speaks again, the words come slowly, as if he’s dragging them out against his own will.
“This would all be so much easier,” he says, “if you looked at me the way other people do.”
I don’t say anything.
His hands are still around my wrists, but gently now, almost reverently, as if he’s afraid I’ll disappear if he lets go too fast.
“If you looked at me like a body to use,” he continues, the grief in his voice so quiet, it almost doesn’t sound like grief at all, “maybe I could survive that. Maybe I’d know what to do with that.”
His jaw tightens. I can feel the effort it takes for him to keep saying this.
“But you don’t.”
The sentence lands between us like something breakable.
He swallows hard. His eyes stay on mine.
“You look at me like there’s still a person under all of this,” he says, and for the first time all night, his voice sounds close to breaking. “And that’s what makes this impossible.”
My whole body stills.
Because beneath the alcohol and the anger and the wanting, that is the truth of it, isn’t it? Not that he touched me. Not that I wanted him to. Not that I’m standing here in his room with my hands on his chest while my heart tries to beat its way out of me.
It’s that he knows I see him.
