Chapter 12 #3
Every breath a desperate prayer against her skin.
Her moans echo off the rooftop. Her voice goes ragged as she chants my name like a fucking prayer. And when she comes again — shaking, sobbing, breaking apart beneath me — I follow her straight into the abyss.
Groaning her name as I empty inside her, feeling the way her body tightens with a desperation that mirrors my own, I realise far too late that there’s no part of me I’ve managed to keep from her — not the jagged pieces, not the soft ones I swore didn’t exist, not even the ghosts that still cling to my ribs like dying vines refusing to let go — because in this moment, I’m fucking claiming her, every part, every inch, every breath she surrenders to me as though she’s never had a safer place to fall.
I don’t move.
Not at first.
She’s still wrapped around me, her legs locked at my waist, her arms loose but trembling, both of us slick with the kind of exhaustion that feels like survival rather than ruin, our chests rising and falling out of sync like two broken things learning how to breathe in the same rhythm for the first time.
Perhaps we have survived something.
Something violent.
Something that reshaped the world around us without asking permission.
My hands remain on her hips as if releasing her might make the night fracture at my feet; her touch is an anchor, a reminder that my body is still here, grounded, human, alive, and not somewhere else where sand suffocates and silence screams. And my cock is still buried deep inside her, the aftershock of it a quiet ache, a tether, a confession I didn’t mean to give her yet.
Her forehead brushes mine — soft, tentative, barely a whisper of contact — and that gentleness unravels me more thoroughly than any battle, any memory, any scream that’s ever clawed its way out of my chest.
“I should let you go,” I murmur, my voice hoarse and uneven, worn down like gravel beneath boots.
She exhales a shaky laugh, small and wounded and utterly disbelieving. “But you won’t.”
“No,” I say quietly, my lips grazing the corner of her mouth, tasting the ghost of her breath. “I fucking won’t.”
She looks at me — really looks at me — her eyes glassy, lashes damp, mascara smeared like the aftermath of a war neither of us walked away from clean, hair wild from my fingers, cheeks flushed and still glowing with the memory of what we just did beneath a sky that never cared enough to witness us until now.
And she has never looked more dangerous.
More devastating.
More painfully, undeniably mine.
“I’ve never felt anything like that,” she whispers.
“You make me forget how to breathe,” I whisper back, the truth dragging itself out of me with a raw, reluctant honesty I’ve never given anyone. “You make me forget how to leave.”
There — that flicker in her expression.
Hope.
Fear.
That fragile aching space where both live together, clinging to one another like two hands reaching over the edge.
And I hate myself for the next truth that forces its way up my throat.
“I’m not good for you, butterfly.”
She traces a line across my shoulder, her fingertips trembling, gentle enough to split me open. “You keep saying that,” she murmurs. “But you don’t stop.”
“Because I’m selfish,” I rasp, pressing my face against her neck, inhaling the warm sweetness of her skin like I’m trying to memorise the one thing that still feels real.
“Because every time I tell myself to walk away, you look at me like I could be something more than the damage I’ve lived through. ”
Silence falls — thick, potent, a pause heavy with words neither of us is brave enough to speak aloud.
Then, quietly, she says, “Maybe you already are.”
Fuck.
I let my head rest on her shoulder and breathe her in — not the idea of her, not the fantasy, but the real woman in front of me, warm and trembling and soft in all the places I’ve forgotten softness existed.
She smells like sin and sweetness, like something that could build a home out of a man who’s only ever known collapse.
And I can’t have it.
Not with thirty days left.
Not when half of me is already back in the desert, where sunlight burns and shadows swallow and every breath feels borrowed.
So I pull out of her slowly, careful, reverent — and the separation hurts more than I thought anything still could. She watches me, lips parted, chest rising too fast, eyes soft in a way that makes something inside me collapse in on itself.
But she doesn’t speak.
Neither do I.
I lie beside her and drag her against my chest, holding her with arms that have only ever known restraint and violence, holding her like she is the only thing tethering me to the here and now, to the version of myself I wish I could stay.
Because I didn’t fuck her tonight.
I worshipped her.
I burned for her.
And now I’m burning with the knowledge that this fire has an ending.
Because this was never meant to last.
Because men like me aren’t built to keep good things.
Because in thirty days, I return to the dead, and she deserves more than a ghost wearing a soldier’s skin.
The stars watch us with cold indifference.
She is warm.
Glowing faintly in the moonlight, skin bare and soft as she presses against me, her leg hooked over mine like she’s already learned the shape of belonging, her fingers tracing the tattoo on my chest — the one no one touches — and I let her, because pushing her away now would feel like extinguishing the last light I have left.
“Do you regret it?” she whispers.
I turn my head. Her eyes find mine instantly, as if she’s been waiting.
“Do I look like a man who regrets having you screaming under the stars?”
Her cheeks flush, the colour blooming like something fragile and alive, and I feel it in my chest like a bruise that won’t heal.
“No,” she whispers. “But you look like a man who’s about to run.”
The truth sits in my throat like glass.
Sharp.
Unavoidable.
Cutting.
I say nothing.
She shifts upright, my shirt slipping down her arm, her lips kiss-bruised and swollen, her hair still tangled from my hands — and she is heartbreakingly beautiful, heartbreakingly hopeful, heartbreakingly brave.
“You don’t have to say anything,” she murmurs. “I just need to know if you’ll be here tomorrow.”
Tomorrow.
Thirty more of them.
Then sand.
Silence.
Heat.
War.
“I can’t promise you anything,” I say at last, the words scraping out of me. “I don’t know who I am when I’m not trying to survive.”
She nods slowly, biting her lip to steady herself. “Then just be whoever you are tonight.”
I sit up and pull her gently into my lap; she comes willingly, soft and warm and trusting in a way that hurts more than any wound I’ve ever taken.
I cup her jaw with a hand built for breaking things, and it terrifies me how easily she leans into it.
“Tonight I’m yours,” I say, voice low, honest, cracking open pieces of me I’ve never let anyone touch. “And I swear to God, butterfly, I’m trying not to fall.”
She presses her forehead to mine, her breath warm and trembling. “You already have.”
And when I kiss her again — slow, aching, raw — it’s not with hunger or urgency, not with desperation or greed, but with the terrifying realisation that for the first time in years, I have something to lose.
And for the first time, it isn’t the war I fear.
It’s her.
It’s the way she looks at me like I’m worth saving.
It’s what I’d do to keep her.
What I’d become if I lost her.
And somewhere deep in the hollowed-out places inside me, a truth settles like a warning:
Butterflies don’t survive men like me —
but God help me, I’d burn the whole world down just to keep her flying.