Sneak Peek
Incandescent
Xavier
I'm on my knees, and even that feels profane in its inadequacy.
I could lower myself until my forehead kissed the floor. I could split my chest open and lay every ruined piece at her feet. It still wouldn't descend far enough to meet the volcanic agony lodged beneath my ribs, that molten star burning through bone, breath, and reason.
A sound gathers in my throat, raw and humiliating.
I let it escape.
Pride has no place here. Dignity is a language for men who haven't learned what it means to lose the one soul their entire existence orbits.
So I show her all of me.
The tremor in my hands. The wreckage in my voice. The man I become when she isn't beside me, not touching me, not looking at me as if I am still worth keeping.
If there's any mercy left in her. I want the smallest piece. A silver. A wound. Anything.
I want her to know she isn't an attachment to my life. She's the axis of it. The first point. The final destination. The constellation by which every broken part of me find its way back.
My beginning. My end. My gravity.
I am weak for her. Pathetic in my devotion. Alive only because I believe my next breath might bring me closer to her.
And God help me, I wouldn't choose to be anything else.
"I don't know how to live without you, amor." The words scrape up my throat and fall between us, pathetic in their nakedness.
My wife stares at me for one endless moment, then slowly sinks to her knees in front of me.
The movement knocks the breath out of me.
She's crying. I see it now. Tears slipping down her face, her mouth trembling once before she stills it. But there's nothing helpless in her. Nothing broken in the way I want there to be, because broken things can sometimes be mended.
Yara leans in just enough to make me feel the distance between us. "What is so sacred about your knees, Xavier?"
I go still.
"What is so damn special about seeing you down here now?" she asks. "Do you think being this low, crying pathetically makes it hurt less?"
Shame carves through me, swift and merciless.
"Look at me," she whispers.
I do.
Her eyes are wet. Devastated. Furious.
She brushes at her own tears with angry fingers. "You see this? I'm crying too." Her voice is low and unsteady. "So tell me, what exactly is supposed to move me here? That you finally found the floor? Or that your guilt got loud enough for you to hear it?"
It feels like I'm being stabbed in a thousand places with each word.
I try to speak. Nothing comes out .
"Did my tears count less because I was standing when they fell?" she persists. "Was my pain easier to ignore because it was happening to me instead of you?"