How do you know what she wants?
Korvash's question again. And this time, the answer was clear.
He didn't know.
He'd assumed. He'd respected her stated wishes without ever challenging them, without ever asking if those wishes were real or just armor she'd built to protect herself from wanting things she was afraid to lose.
He'd let her go because he thought that's what she needed.
But maybe what she needed was someone who wouldn't let her run.
Maybe what she needed was someone who'd fight.
The condo felt different when he got home.
Still quiet. Still ordered. Still painfully empty.
But Tarmek moved through it with new eyes, seeing the traces of Edie everywhere. The indent in the couch cushion where she'd curled up to sketch. The faint paint stain on the kitchen counter he'd never quite managed to scrub away. The empty space on the bookshelf where she'd shoved her paperback romance novels between his hockey statistics volumes.
Evidence.
He found another hair tie in the bathroom, wrapped around the handle of his hairbrush. He found a forgotten earring in the soap dish—a tiny emerald stud that matched the team colors. He found glitter.
So much glitter.
It sparkled from impossible places: the grout between bathroom tiles, the fibers of his doormat, the seams of his leather couch. He'd vacuumed three times since she left, and somehow the glitter persisted, tiny green and gold specks that caught the light like evidence of magic.
"Craft herpes," she'd called it once, laughing at his expression of horror. "Glitter never truly leaves. It's the gift that keeps on giving."
He'd complained about the mess.
Now he found himself hoping he'd never get it all.
The bedroom was worse.
His sheets were clean—he'd washed them twice, unable to sleep with her scent still clinging to the fabric. But the pillow on herside still held the impression of her head. The nightstand drawer still contained the hair serum she'd left behind. The closet?—
Don't.
But he opened it anyway.
Empty hangers where her colorful clothes had hung. Bare shelf where her shoes had scattered. But there, shoved in the back corner, a single item she'd missed.
Her favorite sweater.
Oversized, cable-knit, the color of autumn leaves. She'd worn it constantly in those first weeks, wrapped up against the cold while she worked on early mural concepts. He'd peeled it off her body more than once, impatient and hungry and desperate to touch skin.
Tarmek pulled the sweater from the closet and pressed it to his face.
Her scent hit him like a physical blow.
Paint and coffee and something floral—the lotion she used, the one that made her skin impossibly soft. Underneath that, something uniquely her, indefinable but unmistakable.
He stood there for too long, breathing her in, feeling the ache in his chest expand until it threatened to crack his ribs.
This is pathetic.
He didn't care.
