He reaches for me with trembling hands, pulling me into his arms. He smooths my hair back, guiding my face into the hollow of his shoulder.
“What have I done?” he breathes, horrified. “Please—please tell me you’re okay, babe.”
“I’m okay.” I nod against him, even though my pulse is still hammering.
“I’m so—I’m so sorry,” he says through broken breaths, lacing my face with quick kisses. “I’m so terribly s-sorry.”
“I’m fine,” I answer quietly as I push myself up. “What happened?”
He doesn’t speak.
He watches me instead, lips unsteady, eyes wet, his body tense as he tries to hold himself together.
“Please, talk to me.”
He dives into my arms like a frightened animal and rests his head against my belly.
“I can’t lose you, Isabella …”
“You won’t lose me.” I run my fingers though his hair.
His grip on my waist tightens as he buries his face deeper into my embrace. “I won’t let you go. I will make you love me, I swear to you,” he sobs lightly. “No matter how much it takes, I can make you love me.”
I knew he wasn’t the person he kept pretending to be.
Under everything he shows, there’s someone shattered, someone who never got the chance to feel safe.
A man carrying wounds he never asked for, fear he never outran, damage no one ever helped him name. Terrified, shaped by everything that’s hurt him. He just wants to be loved.
“It’s not hard for someone to love you,” I say, keeping him close.
I say the words that live in my bones, forged by what I survived, not what I was taught.
I say the words no one gave me when I was young, when absence still passed for love and silence still felt like protection.
I say the words I saw crouched inside his plea; the confession buried beneath his need to be wanted.
If he only knew how broken I feel inside, how I bear the same kind of brokenness he carries but hides worse than I do. If he understood how violently everything shifted in me the second he came back, picking me over every sick warning, every disgusting action he chose to overlook.
“What?” he asks me with wide eyes.
“It’s not hard for someone to love you,” I repeat.
“I don’t need anyone’s love or approval.” He holds my face, pressing his forehead against mine. “I need you. Only you.”
“Adam …”
“Isabella,” he cuts me off. “I’ll make you love me. Even if you push me away, I’ll come back to you, broken. I’ll come back crawling. I’d come back every time. Every—” He pulls back, his eyes burning into mine. His chest rises too fast.
“Drag me through hell if you want. Burn every part of me that wasn’t made for you,” he whispers. “I’d let you do it again. And again. As many times as it takes. Until there’s nothing left of me but the parts that belong to you.”
My heart races.
I knew I was fucked the second I saw him. I never believed in that cliché instant-love bullshit. That always felt fake, like something people said after the damage was already done. But with him, something shifted. Quietly, yet violently.
I was too afraid to confess it out loud, even admit it to myself.
Even when I thought he was a monster I should stay away from, I still couldn’t. Maybe because I recognize something familiar in him.
