Chapter 25 #2
He sees the child in me who learned to hear love as bait and still, still wants to trust the way it sounds in his mouth.
He loves me through every second of it, like he is furious that the world ever taught me not to.
Lifting one of his bloodied hands from my face with visible effort, like even that small break in contact costs him something, he takes my wrist, guiding my hand down, pressing my palm against the moth on his skin.
The second I feel it beneath my hand, something in me gives.
Not because I have never touched it before.
I have. I know the shape of it now. I know the warmth of his body, the way that hidden piece of him felt like a secret the first time I saw it.
But this is different. He is not letting me discover it now.
He is placing me there on purpose, making me feel it, making me understand what he is trying to say without hiding behind anything softer.
His hand stays over mine.
His forehead hovers so close to mine that every breath we take brushes the other’s mouth. I can feel how hard he is trying to hold himself together, only to fail. Not in a way that frightens me. In a way that breaks my heart.
“The girl with the moth,” he says, his voice so rough it sounds torn open. “The girl who looked at me like I was still worth something. The girl who made a miserable boy feel, for the first time in his whole goddamn life, like maybe he deserved to stay alive long enough to become a man.”
My throat closes.
His eyes do not leave mine.
“There was nothing in that place for me before you,” he says. “Nothing. Just the pain of waiting and reminders of a past I could never out run...then...there was you.”
The hand over mine tightens slightly against the moth.
“You,” he says again, quieter now. “With your paintings and your mouth and your stupid little facts and that fucking moth in a jar like beauty could just be kept alive because you were gentle enough with it. You looked at me like I wasn’t already too far gone.”
By then the tears are coming too hard for me to stop them.
He sees every one of them. His jaw tightens like he hates the sight because he hates that the world ever made me cry like this in the first place.
“Please,” he says.
The word shudders out of him.
It does not sound like weakness. It sounds like truth stripped all the way down.
“Please don’t make me stop,” he gasps, a man pleading in a way men never pleaded with me before, not honestly, not with their heart in it. “Please let me love you.”
The room goes very quiet after that.
Not because the house is quiet. Because everything in me is listening.
I have spent so much of my life learning that love is what people say right before they ruin you.
Right before they ask for your silence, or your body, or your obedience.
Love was never a safe word in my life. It was bait.
It was camouflage. It was what ugly things wore when they wanted to look holy.
But he is standing in front of me bloodied and half-undressed, shaking around the truth of himself. Nothing about him looks hidden now. Nothing about this feels dressed up.
It feels terrifying.
It feels real.
“Love me…” I whisper, the words almost dying in my throat because I don’t know how to ask for this without sounding like a child begging for something she was taught she didn’t deserve.
His nose brushes mine.
His mouth is so close that I can feel every broken breath he pulls in.
“So long as you let me love you,” I finish, barely louder than the space between us.
The sound he makes at that is enough to undo me completely.
Then he kisses me.
Not carefully.
Not politely.
Not like he is trying to seduce me.
He kisses me like the truth of us has been strangling him and this is the first full breath he’s been allowed to take.
His mouth crashes into mine with all the grief he has been trying to keep under his skin.
I meet him with everything I have left. My hand stays pressed to the moth.
His bloody fingers spread against my jaw again.
Our tears smear. Our mouths part, answering one another in the same breath.
It is not a neat kiss.
It is not the kind of kiss girls like me are taught to dream about.
It is hungry in a way I don’t have language for.
He kisses me like he is trying to pour every impossible thing in him into my mouth because words are no longer enough.
I kiss him back like I finally understand that wanting and being loved do not have to be separate things.
There is no game left between us. No hiding.
No performance. Only this, the raw collision of two broken people finally saying yes to the thing they have both been circling in fear.
My fingers curl harder against his skin.
His breath catches.
His forehead knocks lightly against mine when we break for one second, both of us gasping. Kissing me again before I can fully open my eyes, it feels like he cannot bear the distance now that he knows what it means to lose it.
In that kiss, in the blood, in the tears and truth of it, love stops sounding like a weapon for the first time in my life.