Chapter 33 #2
That last part hits harder than I’m ready for. It cracks something jagged open inside me because he truly believes that. And the knowledge that I put that thought in his head makes the guilt coil sharper under my ribs.
“Kyle…” My voice breaks on his name, the single word barely holding together. “I never—”
“You did,” he says, softer than before, his voice catching in a way that makes the small space around us feel unbearably fragile. “You told me it couldn’t be real. And I… I listened. I tried to respect the line you drew.”
He drags in a breath that sounds uneven, like the simple act of taking in oxygen requires effort he no longer has. It’s a breath someone takes when holding themselves together has stopped being possible. It hits me with a clarity so sharp it feels like a shard folding into my chest.
“Every time I tried to leave you alone,” he continues, voice thinning with something he probably hasn’t admitted to anyone else, “it felt like cutting away something I didn’t know how to live without.”
Something in me buckles enough that I feel my balance shift.
I close my eyes for a moment because the pressure behind them threatens to spill over, and I know if I let even one tear fall in this tiny elevator, I won’t be able to stop the rest. My fingers curl around the strap of my bag so tightly my knuckles ache, the leather biting into my palm like a reminder to keep my feet on the ground.
When I open my eyes again, he’s watching me with an expression I don’t have the strength to decipher.
“Why are you still here?” he asks, shaped around bruised hope he’s trying to hide, a plea wrapped in fear as if he is asking something else entirely.
Why now?
Why, after you walked away?
Why, after a week of silence?
Are you here because you want something from me or because you’re about to break me again?
I hear every version of that question inside the single breath he uses to speak it. It slices straight through the walls I’ve spent a week reinforcing.
“I don’t know,” I admit, the truth sliding out before I can cage it with logic. “I just… couldn’t go home yet.”
His eyes soften with understanding, and he nods, as if he recognizes the place I’m speaking from because he’s been standing in that same place for days. He studies me for a moment that stretches too long to be comfortable and too honest to be denied.
“You look like you’re barely holding it together,” he says, his voice gentle in a way that breaks my composure more cleanly than sharpness ever could.
“I’m fine,” I whisper, the lie tasting like something brittle and overused.
“You don’t have to lie to me.”
The elevator hums around us, descending floor by floor, but the walls feel like they’ve created a pocket of suspended time. One where every emotion we tried to bury has followed us inside, waiting in the air between us, refusing to be ignored.
His chest rises on a slow breath, and he leans back against the railing, his eyes locked on mine, seeing far too much. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m tired,” I say, though the word feels too small to hold everything inside me.
“You’re hurting.”
The simplicity of it—his certainty, his quiet acknowledgment—hits with the weight of truth I don’t want to name.
“Kyle,” I say, my voice breaking at the edges, “please don’t—”
“Don’t what? Don’t notice you? Don’t care?”
“Don’t make this harder.”
His laugh isn’t a laugh at all. It’s a quiet, broken exhale that carries no humor, only exhaustion. “Alycia, I don’t know how to make anything about you easier.”
The soft hum of the machinery is the only sound, a low vibration beneath my shoes, but even that feels like it's holding its breath, waiting for one of us to move, to speak, to break first. My pulse knocks painfully against my ribs, each beat loud enough that it feels like it’s echoing in the tight metal box with us.
And every time I try to breathe around it, the breath shudders, catching on the sharp edges of regret I’ve been swallowing for weeks.
My hands stay clenched at my sides, nails biting half-moon shapes into my palms, and I can’t decide if I’m grounding myself or punishing myself.
“Kyle…” I manage, but the rest dissolves under the weight of everything I can’t say.
He steps near enough for the space between us to thicken with the ache neither of us is pretending away anymore. His breath brushes the air between us, warm and uneven, and it draws me in like gravity.
“No more pretending?” he asks softly, but there’s nothing soft about the emotion threaded through it. It’s raw. It’s wrecked. It’s hope and fear and longing all pressed into one trembling question.
“I’m not pretending,” I say, voice cracking in the middle. “I just… I don’t know how to do this without breaking something else.”
Something flickers across his face—pain, understanding, devastation—and it guts me completely. He’s been breaking alone while I’ve been hiding behind caution and fear.
“Alycia…” he murmurs, and the way he says my name makes the tears spill before I can blink them back. “Look at me.”
I do, and the truth hits all at once, leveling everything I’ve been holding together with sheer willpower. I’m suddenly trembling in a way I can’t conceal, and he sees every bit of it.
“Let it break,” he says, voice breaking with it. “Stop holding everything together just because you’re afraid it will hurt. It already hurts.”
A soft, wrecked sound slips out of me. “Kyle…”
“Alycia… tell me what this is.”
I look up at this man who has given me patience and every quiet truth I wasn’t brave enough to name, and something inside me tears open.
I inhale, finally ready to stop running from the thing that’s been clawing its way out of me for weeks, but the elevator shudders and eases to a stop.
The motion is so slight it feels cruel as the doors slide open.
It feels like I’m stepping out of a dream I wasn’t ready to wake up from as Kyle takes a single step back.
“Goodnight, Alycia.” His voice is soft in a way that guts me, threaded with resignation and a tenderness that feels like a hand smoothing over a bruise. “Get home safe.”
He walks out without a backward glance. The moment he crosses that threshold, his absence hits the air like something physical and pitches me forward.
It’s not a choice, but a truth I’ve been running from, grabbing hold of me with both hands.
Before the elevator doors close and I lose the fragile, shaking thread of courage I finally found, I step forward, too.
The hallway outside is colder than the elevator, a chill that seeps straight through silk and bone.
His footsteps echo ahead of me, laced with a finality that makes my chest clamp down.
I follow anyway, my heels tapping a shaky rhythm against polished concrete that sounds too loud in the empty corridor.
“Kyle.”
My voice comes out thinner than I intend, but it reaches him. His shoulders tense, not with the sharp defensiveness I’ve seen in other men when they feel cornered, and he turns slowly.
“Kyle—”
“What do you want me to say, Alycia?” he asks, and his voice is quiet enough that it shouldn’t hurt, but it does. “Because I feel like I’ve said everything I can.”
I stop a few feet away, my heart pounding so hard I can feel it in my fingertips. “That’s not fair. You left before I could answer.”
“Because every time I get close to hearing the truth, you build another wall,” he says, his jaw working as though he’s biting down on something sharp. “Higher. Thicker. Stronger. And I’m tired of talking to your walls.”
The words land like a blow because they’re not wrong. They’re not gentle either, but they’re not meant to be because they’re the truth.
“You don’t know what it took for me to build these walls in the first place.”
He steps closer, the distance between us shrinking until I can see the tightness at the corners of his mouth that wasn’t there weeks ago. “Then tell me why you’re so afraid of letting anything be real.”
I feel the words I’ve kept shut away so long they feel like contraband gathering like pressure against my ribs, but they don’t dissolve this time.
“You don’t understand.”
“You’re right,” he says, and there’s no sarcasm in it, only weary surrender. “I don’t because you won’t let me. You keep acting like I’m supposed to accept half-truths and polite lies and call it enough.”
My fingers curl into my palms so tightly the skin across my knuckles stretches white. The garage seems to narrow around us. I could deflect and change the subject like I always do, or better yet, just walk away. Instead, I feel something break open.
“He destroyed me.”
The words land flat, stripped bare, as if they have been waiting years to finally break free. Kyle’s expression tightens, confusion sliding into something heavier when he takes in the way I steady a hand against the wall. “What? Who?”
“My old boss at my first internship.” I swallow, and it feels like sandpaper all the way down. The memories roll over me so hard my vision flashes at the edges. “He… tried things and made it clear that my ambition came with strings I never agreed to.”
Kyle’s whole body goes taut. His hands curl into fists so sharply I can hear his knuckles protest. It’s not anger at me but for me, and somehow, that makes it both easier and infinitely harder to keep talking.
“He cornered me after hours one night,” I say, forcing myself to stay with the memory even as my stomach twists. “Told me I had ‘potential,’ that he could ‘make sure the right people saw it,’ and then put his hands on me like that was the price of being taken seriously.”
The hurt on Kyle’s face is immediate and visceral, like every word is a blow he can’t block, but he doesn’t interrupt.
“I told him no.” My throat closes around the word. “I said it clearly and in every way I could think of. But the next morning, he called me ‘overly sensitive’ in a meeting, and he stopped copying me on emails.”