Chapter 16
ANTHONY
The temperature had dropped overnight, but I couldn’t feel it.
My breath fogged the air as I stepped onto the back porch with a mug of coffee and set it down on the step before lowering myself beside it.
The wood was cold through my jeans. I registered that only because I knew I should.
My body felt distant, like it belonged to someone else.
My hands were steady enough to carry the mug, but there was a tight, humming tension in my arms and shoulders, the kind that came from holding yourself too rigid for too long.
I’d woken before dawn again.
That wasn’t unusual.
Sleep had always been something that avoided me more than it found me, but after a night like last night, it felt less like a need and more like a luxury I wasn’t allowed anymore.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him the way he’d looked on the beach—folded into himself, barely conscious, sand clinging to his face, his breath shallow and uneven.
The memory rose in me like nausea. It pressed behind my ribs until my chest felt too tight to expand properly.
I watched the sky instead. Dark sapphire fading into gray. The slow, quiet push of morning undoing the night.
My jaw ached from how tightly I’d been clenching it. I forced it to loosen. My breath came out slow and controlled, but my lungs still felt like they weren’t getting enough air. There was a faint buzzing under my skin, a restless agitation that made me want to move and freeze at the same time.
I’d watched Elliot move through grief before. I’d seen anger. Withdrawal. Collapse. Numbness. But last night wasn’t any of those. Last night felt like surrender.
That realization made my stomach turn.
It wasn’t dramatic or loud. It was quiet. Heavy. The kind of giving up that happens when someone runs out of internal resistance. When they stop pushing against the weight of the world and simply let it press them flat.
The image of him on the sand replayed with brutal clarity.
His body folded inward like it had forgotten how to take up space. Tears streaking pale tracks through the grit on his cheeks. Blood dried on his hands. The faint blue tinge to his lips when he tried to speak and couldn’t.
The memory made my throat tighten until swallowing hurt. My fingers curled slowly into fists against my thighs and then loosened again, over and over, like my body was trying to decide whether it needed to fight or flee.
“Fuck,” I muttered. The word felt too small.
I reached for my cigarettes before I could stop myself. I’d tried to quit. Tried to cut back. Tried to be better. But everything in me felt too raw lately to give anything up. Like I was already stripped down to the bone and someone was asking me to shed more.
The cherry flared bright in the dim light as I inhaled. The smoke burned my lungs and I welcomed it. It felt appropriate. And not enough at the same time.
The pain grounded me. Gave my body something simple and immediate to respond to. Something physical instead of this endless internal ache that didn’t have a location.
The sky was beginning to bloom with color now—pale orange bleeding into pink—and the sight of it made something in my chest tighten painfully. It reminded me too much of blood in water. Of the way his wrist had looked when I’d first seen it. Of how fragile he’d felt in my arms.
The sickening truth I couldn’t escape was this:
I was the common thread through most of his recent pain. Not because I meant to hurt him. Not because I wanted to. But because I didn’t know how to love him without damaging him.
That realization sat heavy in my gut, like something spoiled I couldn’t digest.
The way I wanted him scared me. Not in a simple way. Not in a way that felt clean or straightforward. I wanted him in a way that felt gravitational. Like being pulled toward something you know you shouldn’t touch because you’re not sure you’ll survive the contact.
It wasn’t lust. It wasn’t fantasy. It was this deep, unbearable awareness of him. Of his presence. His vulnerability. The way my attention locked onto him and didn’t let go.
I loved him like something precious I didn’t trust myself to hold. It terrified me. Because I couldn’t walk away from it. I could walk away from desire. But I couldn’t walk away from care.
I’d lost people before.
I learned early what it felt like to be unwanted. To be corrected instead of accepted. To be tolerated instead of chosen. That kind of rejection hardens you. It teaches you to expect loss.
But Elliot didn’t reject me. He leaned toward me. He trusted me. He needed me. And that felt heavier than any abandonment ever had.
David’s friendship with expectations attached.
For a long time I didn’t understand that. When we were younger, I thought it was just loyalty. Friendship. The way men showed care for one another without saying it out loud. But looking back now, with distance and damage between us, I could see it clearly for what it was.
Everything with David came with a price.
He wanted me to be loud. Visible. Devoted.
He wanted me to take up space for him—to cheer him on, to stand behind him, to be the person who made him feel important.
My support wasn’t optional; it was assumed.
And any time I faltered, any time I needed something instead of giving it, the air between us would tighten.
There was always an unspoken ledger. What have you done for me lately?
I felt it when I hesitated. When I was tired.
When my own life grew heavy. His disappointment wasn’t explosive—it was worse than that.
It was quiet. Withdrawal disguised as maturity.
Distance framed as understanding. I bent myself around it for years.
Because I thought that was what love looked like.
Natalie was the opposite of that.
She never asked me to perform for her. Never asked me to be less or more than I was. She let me be uncertain. Broken. Quiet. Angry. She never made me feel like my worth was tied to what I gave her.
She gave first. She gave freely. She gave without expecting repayment. That was the kind of friendship I understood. That was the kind of friendship that felt safe. That was why I confused what we had for love. It was the first time anyone accepted me just as I was.
That was why losing her broke something fundamental in me—because she was the only relationship in my life that had ever been unconditionally kind.
David hadn’t meant to hurt me. But he taught me something dangerous anyway:
That love always costs something. That being close to someone means you owe them.
But Elliot wasn’t his parents.
The relationship I had with him was entirely our own. Elliot was a responsibility and a longing and a wound and a mirror all at once. He asked for nothing except that I stay. That I didn’t leave. That I didn’t vanish when things got ugly.
That should have been the easiest promise in the world. Yet somehow it was the hardest thing I’d ever tried to keep. Because every instinct in me wanted to give him more than I was allowed to. Every moral boundary in me told me I had to pull away.
So I overcorrected. I retreated. I distanced myself from him. I tried to be colder, steadier, safer. I tried to be what I thought he needed me to be. And in doing that, I hurt him anyway.
I finished the cigarette and crushed it under my heel.
My hands were shaking slightly now. I pressed them together until the tremor stilled. I inhaled slowly. Exhaled slower. Slowly I pulled myself together, piece by broken piece. When I headed inside I almost had myself fooled that I was functioning like a normal person.
I busied myself in the kitchen because standing still felt dangerous.
Poured another mug of coffee and added too much milk because I knew he liked it that way, watching the color shift from dark brown to soft tan like something gentler was being layered over something bitter.
My chest tightened at the familiarity of that knowledge—the quiet intimacy of knowing how someone took their coffee, how someone needed their toast just a little more done than necessary because they liked the crunch.
Uncertain of when he’d last eaten, I popped some bread in the toaster. Buttery, warm, simple. It wasn’t much, but it was something solid. Something his body could accept even if his heart couldn’t.
I moved slowly, deliberately, like if I rushed I might drop something—or make a decision I wasn’t ready to face.
The house was quiet in that suspended early-morning way where everything felt fragile. The toaster popped. The sound felt too loud and too soft at the same time.
Once I’d buttered the toast, I set it on a small plate then placed it and the mug onto a tray, and lifted it carefully. It felt heavier than it should have. Not because of the weight of ceramic and bread but because of what it meant.
Care was heavier than love sometimes.
I started toward the stairs with it balanced in both hands, my pulse thudding low and steady in my ears. How do you love someone without either consuming them or abandoning them?
The question followed me up every step. The stairs creaked under my weight like they always did. I paused halfway up, breath catching slightly, listening to see if he was awake yet. Nothing.
I continued without a second thought. The hallway was dim. Pale morning light filtered in through the window at the end, casting soft shadows across the doors. His door was closed.
That alone made something tighten inside me.
It was open—just how I’d left it last night—when I passed it earlier.
I stopped in front of it and hesitated. I told myself I was giving him privacy.
That I was being respectful of the boundary he’d given me.
That I’d simply knock and leave the tray by his door.