Broken.
My whole body reacted to it.
The kiss ended, but he did not move away.
His forehead rested against mine, his breathing uneven, his hand still curved around the back of my head like he was holding me together, or holding himself together through me.
“I love you,” Tobias said.
The words struck so hard I stopped breathing.
He said them quietly, but there was nothing tentative in them. No uncertainty. No fragile, newly discovered thing being tested aloud. He sounded like he was confessing something ancient, something that had existed long before either of us was ready to hear it.
“I love you,” he repeated, and this time his voice broke around the edges. “I have loved you in every way I have understood how to love anything, and in several ways I still do not understand at all.”
I stared at him.
The aquarium wing blurred.
The snakes. The tanks. Ben above us. Mark. The water. The locked rooms. The dream. The glass. His hand pressed to minethrough a barrier that had always been there, even before I knew what it meant.
“I don’t…” My voice failed. I swallowed and tried again. “I don’t know what to do with that.”
Pain moved through his face, but he did not retreat from it. “I know.”
I laughed once, broken and wet. “Of course you do.”
His thumb stroked my cheek again, catching another tear. “You don’t have to do anything with it yet,” he said. “You don’t have to answer it. You don’t have to forgive me. You don’t even have to believe that it is love, if the word means something different to you than it does to me.”
“I think it does,” I whispered.
“I know,” he said again, softer this time. “But it is what I have. It is what I am giving you.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No.”
“You keep giving me things I can’t give back.”
His expression tightened. “I don’t need you to give it back.”
“That’s worse.”
“Perhaps.”
I closed my eyes because looking at him hurt too much.
His arms remained around me, steady and warm, and I hated that I did not want them gone.
I hated that after everything, after the horror above us and the confession between us, some shattered part of me still wanted to fold myself into him and disappear for a while. I hated that his kiss still lingered on my mouth. I hated that the word love had not sounded wrong from him, only dangerous.
Especially dangerous.
Because Tobias did not love like a normal person.
Tobias loved like the ocean took ships.
Completely, and without apology, always without returning what it claimed.
