I close my mouth because, unfortunately, he has a point.
His thumb drags along my cheekbone, rough and tender. “But if you leave because you think your pain is one more thing I shouldn’t have to deal with, then we have a problem.”
I look down between us, but he doesn’t let me hide for long. His hand tips my face back up.
“I don’t want to be another room you have to protect from the truth,” he says. “That’s what you did for eight years. You carried things alone because you thought knowing would hurt me, or because my memory was gone, or because our families made silence feel like mercy. Then you did it again with the plan. I understand why. I hate it, but I understand. But I can’t live like that here.”
Here.
Our island. Our house. The life I killed everything else to reach.
“I don’t want that either,” I say.
“Then stop leaving me out of your pain.”
A sharp breath leaves me. “I was trying to let you sleep.”
“Bullshit,” Nikolaj says, with such immediate force that it almost startles a laugh out of me. “That was part of it, fine. But you were also punishing yourself somewhere I couldn’t stop you.”
I stare at him and he arches a brow faintly, though his eyes remain too bright. “You think I don’t know you?”
My throat works.
He does know me. That is the terrible, beautiful thing. Memory loss stole years from him, but it did not steal the shape of us forever. He learned me again with frightening speed because some part of him had never stopped knowing. He knows when my silence is strategy and when it is shame. He knows when I am being careful with him and when I am using care as a prettier name for distance.
“I hate what I did to you,” I whisper.
His expression softens and hardens at once. “Good. You should,” he says, not cruelly. Honestly. “It was cruel.”
My eyes burn again. “I know.”
“I hear you,” he corrects, almost automatically now, but there is no bite in it.
“I hear you,” I say.
He nods once. “It was cruel. It saved us, maybe. It gave us this. I’m still deciding what to do with that contradiction, and I reserve the right to be a fucking nightmare about it.”
A laugh breaks out of me, wet and involuntary.
His mouth twitches and he huffs softly, then his expression goes serious again. “I hate what you did,” he says. “I don’t hate you.”
My chest aches at his honesty.
“I know you know that,” he continues, and before either of us can flinch, he adds, “I hear myself. Fine. I believe you hear it. But I need to say it anyway because I see the guilt on your face every time I go quiet too long. You think every silence is a verdict.”
I swallow hard because he is not wrong. “I’m working on that,” I say.
“I know,” he says, then exhales in frustration at himself. “Fuck.”
Despite everything, I smile faintly. He glares at me. “This is your fault.”
“My fault?”
“You made me emotionally articulate. I used to be terrifying and efficient.”
A laugh bursts out of me. “You are still terrifying.”
“Not enough. I just used the phrase‘emotionally articulate.’”
