Chapter 21 #2
I nod anyway, despite knowing this isn’t what I should be doing, despite knowing I should turn around, get in my car and never return. I nod because it means a few more minutes around him. It’s as simple as that.
I follow him inside, the door clicking shut behind us, the sound quiet but loud enough for me to hear it over the way my heart pounds in my ears.
The kitchen light is enough to illuminate the entryway and part of the living room, and Roman doesn’t bother to switch on more lights.
We don’t even need to say anything to each other as we sit at the counter, in the same seats we sat that first night I joined him for milk and cereal.
I’d laugh at the fucking irony if I wasn’t too busy trying to understand what the hell I’m even doing here.
My gaze helplessly strays towards the stairs that lead to his former room before I can stop myself, and the stab of pain is immediate just thinking about it—about the room that started feeling like a safe haven simply because Roman was in it. What it felt like waking up alone in it when he left.
I look away from those stairs, only for my chest to tighten when I see the way Roman is watching me, missing nothing of my moment of weakness.
Embarrassment burns through me, but I meet his gaze steadily. It would be so easy so drown into that familiar darkness, to let myself be swept away in it, in the tension radiating from his body right now.
So easy and so devastating.
“How are you, Roman?” I manage to ask, his name rolling off my tongue in a way that feels as natural as breathing.
His eyes flare with something, but it’s gone almost immediately.
His forearms are braced on the counter, his face turned towards me. “I’m alright.”
His low voice curls around me like the smoke of his cigarettes.
“Are you?”
He doesn’t answer, just watches me. Always watching me.
“Why did you come back, Jesse?”
I don’t know. I don’t know why I came back but I give him the only answer I can.
“I’m starting a new job on Monday and it happens to be here so,” I shrug, letting my words drift off.
He nods slowly, and I can feel his eyes caress my face, my hair as it falls over one shoulder, the slope of my neck.
And it’s that look. That fucking look full of such longing that makes something in me snap, that makes my breathing speed up and something hot writhe in my stomach.
Because he doesn’t get to look at me like that.
Like he misses me, like we’re sitting too far away from each other, like it’s killing him not to reach out and touch me. Not when he’s the one who threw it all away, who pushed me away and broke me.
His eyes widen when I stand up and step closer to him, close enough to almost stand between his spread knees when he turns to face me fully, his hands clenching into fists on his thighs.
His lips part on an exhale and that puff of air grazes my mouth.
My voice is a whisper when I speak.
“Why did you leave me, Roman?”
Half of his face is steeped in shadows, but I’m so close that I can see every crack in his expression from my question—the question that’s been eating me alive for the last five years, that I’ve been dying to ask and been dreading the answer.
We might not be touching, our bodies mere inches apart, but even that small, imperceptible distance crackles with electricity, with the same gravitational force I’ve always felt towards him.
It’s all there, the echo of the 18-year-old boy he used to be, still staring back at me, giving me the same look he gave me that night. Only now it’s worse, because his eyes are harder, the flash of emptiness I saw then, now rooted deep, having festered over the years.
“I had to,” he murmurs, and it feels like my lungs are being squeezed of every ounce of air.
“Why?” I manage to choke out.
“It was the right thing to do,” he says quietly, steadily. Convinced. “You were better off without me.”
The admission is a lash on my heart, because I can see it.
I can see that he believes it, that he believes he did the right thing, listening to his father’s hurtful and hateful words, deciding to take himself out of the equation for reasons I still don’t fully understand, leaving without me, letting me go.
I’ve never wanted to hate someone more than I do in this moment.
I want to hate him with all my heart because I know that he would do the same thing even if he had the chance to go back and undo it all.
But how can I hate him when his eyes flutter at the feel of my fingers running through his hair like they’re doing right now. When he melts and leans into the touch like he’s starved for it.
“No, Roman,” I mutter and his gaze sharpens on me. “I wasn’t.”
My breath catches when his hands find my hips and squeeze so hard goosebumps break all over my skin, and I barely swallow back the whimper building in my throat.
“Blue,” he rasps, tearing open the wound that never stopped throbbing.
How dare he. How fucking dare he, using that name.
“Don’t call me that.” He flinches like I’ve slapped him, his hands twitching before moving further up until he’s spanning my waist, his fingers digging in.
“You don’t get to call me that anymore.” My own fingers tighten in his hair, fisting it, tugging it back so he feels it, so he feels the hurt and the anger and the pain he caused me, even as my other hand comes up to cup the side of his face, stroking it gently.
“I’m not ‘Blue’ to you anymore, Roman,” I whisper in the quiet and I feel him shiver, his throat bobbing with his harsh swallow.
“I stopped being ‘Blue’ when I woke up and you weren’t there. ”
And it’s as if, by spilling those words, all the weight I’ve been carrying all this time comes crashing down on me, exhaustion—mental and physical—weighing me down.
Because as I peer into those liquid, tormented eyes, I know, just as I knew back then, that I would have loved him enough for the both of us.
If only he had let me.
If only he had given me a chance.
God, I’ve never felt so fucking tired.
My body sags, my hands releasing him, my arms falling listlessly on either side of me.
My gaze flicks towards the door, and I know Roman doesn’t miss it because his hands become steel bands where he’s holding me. He knows what I’m going to say.
“I need to go. It’s late.”
“Don’t.”
My heart thrashes violently.
“What?”
His eyes burn into me.
“Don’t go. Stay. Just for tonight,” he says hoarsely. “Rest here tonight and leave tomorrow.”
Fuck.
He can’t—he can’t fucking say that to me.
He can’t ask me not to go, not to leave when he—when he—
I start to shake my head, because the words won’t fucking come out to answer him, and his grip flexes as if he senses I’m about to pull away.
As if he wants to keep me there.
“Just for tonight,” he whispers again, and I can feel it.
How my whole body sighs at that rough plea. How much it wants to stay exactly where it is, in his firm hold, and just melt, and rest, and breathe.
And I’m weak. I’m so fucking weak because I want it so much. I want to sleep here under the same roof as him and know that he’s somewhere near, somewhere close to me. I want to stay here when I should be running as fast and as far away from here as possible.
Before I fall into something I’ll never be able to get out of.
It would be so easy to let myself be torn apart by all the contradicting emotions raging inside me.
Instead, I nod. Slowly. Like I don’t realize I’m actually doing it, like it’s impossible to control it.
Roman’s expression changes before my eyes, that bottomless emptiness receding from his gaze, his mouth letting out the tiniest of exhales that speaks of such heartbreaking relief it makes my heart ache.
The same relief that makes me sway on my feet as everything that’s happened in the last couple of days catches up to me, until I’m sure his hands are the only thing still holding me up.
It’s just one night, I think as my limbs get heavier and my eyelids start to feel as if I can barely keep them open.
“Just for tonight,” I mumble against warm skin as a pair of arms carries me off somewhere.
I don’t care where they’re taking me. I just wish they wouldn’t let me go again.