Something deep in my chest ached for him.
“That sounds lonely,” I said gently, and I meant it without a performative show of sympathy.
He shrugged, but the movement lacked conviction.
“It’s safe,” he corrected.
Neither of us spoke after that.
Safe.
Coming from a man who had walked through gunfire without flinching, who described the worst things I could imagine like running through a pre-mission checklist—item by item, nothing skipped, nothing dwelt on. A man who, in three weeks, had never once shown me anything resembling fear.
Except this.
“I’ve always been afraid of that part,” he admitted, his voice dropping so low that I had to hold perfectly still to catch every syllable, to not lose a single word to the ambient dark of the room. “Feelings. What they do to you over time, how they change the way you think. What they cost you when you’re not paying attention, and suddenly you’re making decisions around them instead of around the thing that actually matters.”
He swallowed, the movement visible in his throat.
“And what happens if something goes wrong,” he continued, the words coming slowly, as if he were translating them from a place he’d never let anyone else read. “If I’m thinking about someone instead of what’s in front of me. Or worse—if someone else pays for that.”
I took a slow breath, watching every small shift in his expression.
“I understand that,” I said.
* * *
After a while, I looked at him. He had a bemused expression on his face.
“What?”
He let out a chuckle, devoid of any genuine mirth.
“Nothing. Just lost in thought.”
“About?”
He shot me a quick sideways glance, a smirk playing on his lips.
“You’re not exactly my cup of tea, Libby.”
It hurt.
Square in the place I’d been careless enough to leave exposed. He hadn’t meant it. That was almost the worst part—that it had cost him nothing to say, that the words had come out so easily and weightless, the way only true things can when you’ve never had to think about them.
It was clearly a jest. A playful jab meant for the person sharing the couch so intimately that the mention of ‘type’ had already turned into a shared inside joke, highlighting the undeniable connection between us.
I didn’t move. Didn’t pull away, didn’t let my expression shift. I kept my hand flat against his shirt as though it hadn’t just been told it didn’t belong.
But the sting spread as if I had been struck.
He kept going.
“But somehow… you’re the closest I’ve ever come to actually feeling something real. Something that doesn’t evaporate thesecond it’s over and leave me with nothing but the ceiling and the quiet.”
My lungs simply forgot what they were supposed to do next.
“The sex,” he added, his voice dropping to a near whisper, as if seeking an anchor in something undeniable, something that couldn’t be disputed or misconstrued. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. I don’t know what to do with it. Libby, you do something to me that is both amazing and infuriating. Why now? Why, when the world is ending, am I discovering something beyond anything I’ve ever known?”
