25. Zyran #3
“You came back.” Her head snaps back to me.
“After a year, after getting shot in the neck, you came back and just… just showed up. And now you’re here, in my apartment during a snowstorm.
” Her voice isn’t angry; it’s almost sad, like she thinks the whole reason I’m only here is because of the snow.
It’s not. “What am I supposed to do with that?”
“Nothing. You don’t have to do anything with that.”
“That’s not—” she cuts herself off, blowing out a breath, and presses her fingers to her forehead for a second like she’s trying to organize every single thought that’s filtering through her head. “That’s not how it works, and you know it.”
“Then tell me how it works.”
Esperr looks at me, rolling her eyes. “You can’t just tell someone that and then say they don’t have to do anything with it; it’s not fair.”
“I’m not asking for fair Esperr, I’m not asking for anything.”
“But you did; you asked for the storm,” she hisses. “You asked for four or five days to show me who you are; that’s asking something.”
Fuck.
I don’t say anything, because she’s not wrong. I did ask for the storm; I asked her to give me the shutdown to show her who I am and that she can trust me. And yet here I am, freaking her out because I’ve stalked her for two years—give or take.
She laughs, cutting through my thoughts. “Two years,” she chuckles. “I saw you, I knew you existed."
“You knew…” I repeat, my turn to be confused.
“Well, I’m not blind.” She huffs, dropping onto the chair, and there’s something different in her now; it’s like she’s less guarded. “You were always just there. I always felt eyes on me, and it… it didn’t make me uncomfortable.”
“You never said anything.”
She raises a brow. “Neither did you. Plus I had my reasons.”
“What reasons?”
She looks at me for a second, something moving through her eyes that she lets sit there longer than she normally would, like she’s debating on if she should tell me the truth or how much of it.
“I was running,” she mutters. “From a lot of things, you included… maybe,” she rushes to say. “It’s easier not to know people when you’re planning to leave.”
I smile. “But you didn’t leave.”
“Nope.” Her lips pursed together in thought. “I didn’t.”
I open my mouth to say something when her gaze snaps to mine, a brow raised and a smirk firmly in place. “You could’ve talked to me, but you didn’t. Why?”
“Would you have let me?”
My questions stun her for a moment, her mouth open and then closing—we both already know the answer to that.
“No,” she says finally. “Probably not.”
“Probably?”
Her mouth curves up despite not wanting to. “Definitely not. I would have probably smiled and been perfectly pleasant and made sure you never got past the surface of me.”
“You’re still doing that.”
She looks over at me. “I’m sitting here telling a man who’s stalked me for two years things I don’t tell people,” a brow raised, “ever. So this is not me doing that.”
"What's changed?”
Esperr sits back, tilting her head like she’s actually thinking about my question, not the deflecting kind where she reaches for the quickest exit, but the real kind where she actually goes looking for the answer.
“You didn’t push,” she says eventually. “Everyone pushes, they want more, they want it fast, and they get impatient with parts of you that take time. And you…you waited. It was like you already knew… or thought… you think that I’m worth waiting for, and you didn’t need me to prove it yet.”
Esperr doesn’t look at me while she talks, her gaze completely focused on nearly anything but me.
“Look at me.” I tell her, stepping towards the chair.
She’s hesitant but slowly lifts her gaze towards me, and her eyes are doing that thing—too full, too honest, and all that careful management coming apart at the seams the way it does when she’s tired of holding everything in place.
There’s something young in her face right now, something that doesn’t come out often, the part of her that exists underneath all the armor and the deflection.
I bend down, bringing myself level with her, close enough that she’d have to work to look away. Her breath shifts, and I see the slight change in the way her chest moves differently when I’m in her space.
“You are worth it,” I say slowly. “Every part of you, the parts you show and the parts you think you have to hide. Worth it and more.”
Her jaw tightens, like I’ve hit a nerve.
“You don’t know all my parts,” she whispers.
“You’re right I don’t… but I will.”
“Don’t say things like that.”
My head tilts to the side. “Why?”
“Because I don’t know what to do with it.”
I smile, taking a wide step back, and then another until I’m sitting on the couch. “You don’t have anything to do with it.”
“Zyran.”
“Esperr.”
“Stop doing that.”
“Stop doing what?” I question, pretending that I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“That thing, you know, where you just say something and then…it’s like a grenade, seconds from going off.”
I smirk, “is it working?”
She glances away for a moment before rolling her eyes back at me. “Horrifyingly.”