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I clamp my teeth together.
“Do I repulse you that much?” His voice softens. “Is being near me so unbearable? Do you hate me that much, Ilya?”
“Kento—”
“It hurts, you know.” He takes another half-step, closing the remaining distance until the toe of his boot bumps mine. “When you push me away. When you look at me like you hate me. When you say those vicious little things, it actually fucking hurts.”
The air seems to have undergone some atmospheric depletion, leaving the room unbearably close, because I can barely breathe.
“Do you want to hurt me?” he asks, black eyes shining with pain. “If that’s what you need to feel like you’re in control, go ahead. Say it. Cut me up. I’ll let you do it. But you have to stay, Ilya. I’m not giving you space. I can give you an army. I can give you anyone’s head in a box if you ask for it. But I won’t give you distance. I can’t.”
He turns his head, his eyes tracking across the room, the hundreds of green eyes.
“My whole life is in this room,” he says. “Every hour I wasn’t bleeding for Kenji, I was here. Memorizing you.”
He brings his gaze back to mine.
“I don’t want you to say anything right now. Because if you give me one of your clever, sarcastic excuses, I might not have the stomach to hear it tonight. But you need to know this: I am not backing off. You are mine. You can keep fighting it, but it won’t change where this ends.”
“Why?” My breath trembles on its way out. “Why the hell do you try so hard? All I’ve ever done is fight you. I pulled a gun on you. I stabbed you. I punched you. I’ve done everything I could to make you regret ever looking at me.”
Kento’s mouth twitches with that infuriating smile of his, the one that never quite reaches the proportions of a proper grin yet somehow manages to be infinitely more devastating. “Why do you hate me so much?”
“You know why.”
“No, I don’t.” He leans down, bringing his face inches from mine. “Have I ever lied to you? Have I ever hurt you? Have I ever done anything to you?”
I stay silent, because, really, what the fuck has Kento ever done wrong? I search for an accusation substantial enough to justify the way I have treated him and find nothing that doesn’t disintegrate beneath the slightest scrutiny.
“You’re terrified,” he murmurs. “From the first second you saw me, you were terrified of what you felt. You’ve spent time building a fortress around yourself, and you hate me because I walked right through the front gate.”
“You don’t know what I feel,” I choke out, my voice trembling despite every ounce of willpower I have left.
“You’re right. I don’t.” He nods once. “But I know what I feel.”
He reaches out. His hand touches my cheek, and I melt.
“I love you.”
No. No, no, no. He doesn’t understand. He couldn’t possibly understand what he is saying.
“Don’t,” I whisper, the word cracking right down the middle. “Don’t say that.” My legs are actually giving out, my grip tightening around him as a sickening rush of vertigo sweeps through me.
“I love you,” Kento repeats, his dark eyes boring straight into my soul. “I’m not going to stop loving you. So if you need to hate me, fine. Hate me. Be as vicious as you want. I’ll keep loving you anyway.”
He presses a kiss to the center of my forehead. “Don’t answer me now,” he mutters against my temple. “Just stay here tonight. Look at every single line, and maybe you’ll finally understand that there was never a second where I was disgusted by you. And there will never be a second where I decide to leave.”
He drops his mouth to mine. The kiss is so gentle that my fingers twist into the leather of his jacket just to anchor myself against the pull of it.
When he pulls away, my lips are tingling. He turns without another word and walks toward the double doors.
I stand there alone in the dead center of the floor, surrounded by hundreds of green eyes staring back at me from the dark.
I can’t even count them anymore. They’re everywhere, surrounding me from every angle until it feels less like an art studio and more like the inside of Kento’s head. While I’d been trying to become smaller, less noticeable, easier to ignore, he’d been preserving every version of me.
A shuddering breath tears out of my chest.
I can’t do this anymore.
