Chapter Thirteen #2
The words hit me like a concussion blast. Not because they were loud but because they were precise. Surgical. Delivered with the calm, clear-eyed certainty of a woman who had listened to every word I'd ever said to her and was now reflecting them back with devastating accuracy.
"You said you wanted me to choose you with clear eyes.
" She held my gaze, and her chin was lifted, her jaw was set, and she was magnificent and terrible, and I wanted to scream.
"You said you wanted me to be able to survive without you.
You said you didn't want me to need you—you wanted me to choose you.
Those were your words, Xavier. In this bed.
And I heard them and took them seriously, and I have spent the last four weeks doing the hardest work of my life to become the woman who could do that.
Therapy twice a week. Eating on my own. Breathing—" Her voice wavered, just barely, a hairline fracture in the determination.
"Not because I wanted to, Xavier. Because you needed me to. "
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
"I went back to my apartment twice while Emily stayed downstairs in her car," she continued, and the pillow was pressed so tightly against her chest that her knuckles had gone white, and I recognized the gesture.
The same way she'd gripped the coffee mug, the same way she'd gripped the towel, the same way she'd gripped me.
Holding on to something solid while the ground moved.
"The first time, I stood in the doorway and had a panic attack so bad I had to call Anna from the hallway floor.
The second time, Emily dropped me off and I made it inside.
I sat on my bed and I cried for thirty minutes, and then I made myself stay for another two hours after the crying stopped. "
My chest was caving in. I could feel the slow, structural collapse of something I'd been holding upright through sheer force of will, and I didn't know if what was collapsing was the wall I'd built to protect her or the wall I'd built to protect myself, and it occurred to me with a clarity that was almost violent that they might have been the same wall. I’d done this. I’d forced her into this with my bullshit excuses of wanting to protect her when really I was protecting myself.
"You went alone," I repeated. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else—someone who hadn't just been inside her, someone who hadn't just felt her come apart in his arms, someone who wasn't sitting naked on the edge of a bed that smelled like both of them and watching the woman he loved explain why she was leaving. She jerked her head in agreement.
The sound I made wasn't a word. It was something more primitive, an exhalation that carried the weight of eight weeks of fear and restraint and the particular agony of loving someone so much that you'd convinced yourself the kindest thing you could do was let them leave.
"I'm not leaving you." She said it with a ferocity that vibrated through the room like a struck bell.
"I'm moving back to my apartment because I need to prove—to you, to myself, to the part of your brain that's been running worst-case scenarios since the day you pulled me off that rooftop—that I can stand on my own.
That I can survive a night without your heartbeat.
That I can function as a whole, independent human being who wakes up every morning and chooses you.
Not because the alternative is unbearable. Because you are where I want to be."
She was crying now. Not the quiet, controlled tears she'd mastered over the past weeks, the ones she thought I didn't notice, the ones that leaked out at the corners when she thought I was asleep.
These were messy. Fierce. The tears of a woman who was furious at the necessity of what she was doing and doing it anyway because the man she loved had made it the condition, and she was too stubborn and too brave and too goddamn magnificent to do anything less than meet it.
"You told me to choose you with clear eyes," she said, and her voice broke and reformed and broke again like a wave hitting rocks. "I’m proving that to you in the only way I know how."
I was across the bed before I knew I was moving.
My hands found her face. Wet, flushed, streaked with tears and defiance, and I held her the way I'd held her a hundred times, thumbs against her cheekbones, her jaw cradled in my palms. Except this time I wasn't steadying her.
She was steady. She was the steadiest thing in the room.
She was the steadiest thing in my entire life, and I'd been so busy trying to be her foundation that I'd missed the moment she'd become mine.
"I see you," I said, and my voice was wrecked, the rubble of every defense I'd ever built scattered across the syllables.
"Molly, I see you. I've seen you since the rooftop.
I've seen you since you told me your name in a voice that made me want to burn the world down for what it had done to you. I see you."
"Then stop turning your head," she whispered.
I kissed her.
Not the desperate, consuming kiss from an hour ago.
Not the sleep-drugged, half-conscious kiss from four weeks ago.
This was something else entirely—slow and deliberate and devastating, a kiss that was a promise and an answer and an apology all at once.
I kissed her the way I should have kissed her that morning she'd risen up on her toes in my kitchen with her fingers in my shirt.
I kissed her the way I'd wanted to kiss her every single day since, through my turned head and my forehead redirect and my be good that had tasted like cowardice. I kissed her with clear eyes and an open chest and the full, terrifying, unqualified admission that I was in love with her and had been since I’d seen her on that rooftop.
When I pulled back, her hands were on my wrists again—the same grip, the same anchoring hold—and her eyes were searching my face with the obsessive attention she'd described weeks ago, and I saw the moment she registered something in my expression.
"Don't go."
The words fell out of me like rocks dropped from a height.
No preamble. No careful framing. No tactical positioning of the request within a broader argument about safety or healing or the optimal conditions for recovery.
Just the raw, unvarnished plea of a man who'd spent eight weeks being noble and had just discovered, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, that nobility without her was just a prettier word for emptiness.
"Don't go," I said again, and my thumbs were moving across her cheekbones, wiping tears that kept coming, and my voice was doing something I'd never heard it do—not breaking, exactly, but bending, the way steel bent under enough sustained pressure before it either held or snapped.
"I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it.
I thought I was protecting you, but I was—" My jaw clenched so hard I felt it in my molars.
"I was protecting myself. From the possibility that you'd leave. And the irony of that is so—"
"Xavier—"
"I made you prove something that didn't need proving.
" The admission tore through me like shrapnel, and I could feel every piece of it lodging in places that would ache for a long time.
"You told me. You told me every day in a hundred different ways.
The way you reached for me in your sleep, the way you said my name, the way you tried to kiss me in the kitchen that morning, and I took every single piece of evidence and ran it through a filter designed to reject it.
Because if I accepted it, if I let myself believe you loved me and then you changed your mind—"
I couldn't finish. The sentence dissolved into something that wasn't quite a sound and wasn't quite silence.
My forehead dropped against hers, and I was breathing her air again, and the closeness was both salvation and torment because she was right here and the suitcase was right there, and the distance between those two facts was the distance I'd created with my own fear.
"Stay," I whispered. "Please. Forget what I said about choosing and walking away and clear eyes. Your eyes have been clear since the day I met you. I was the one who couldn't see."
Her hands tightened on my wrists—that fierce, planting-her-feet grip—and for one incandescent, agonizing second I thought she was going to say yes.
I thought the determination in her jaw was going to soften and she was going to lean into me and say okay, and I'd carry the suitcase back to the closet and unpack it myself, item by item, and we'd never speak of it again.
"No."
The word was quiet. Gentle. Absolutely immovable.
"Molly—"
"No." She opened her eyes, and they were bright with tears but steadier than mine, steadier than my hands on her face, steadier than anything I'd ever built or held or defended. "Because you weren't entirely wrong."
"I was—"
"You were wrong about the reason, but not about the need.
" Her hands released my wrists and moved to cover mine where they held her face, her fingers wrapping around my palms with a tenderness that was worse than any refusal because it came packaged with love.
"Xavier, I have slept next to you every night for eight weeks.
I have eaten food you prepared, worn clothes you bought, used breathing techniques you taught me.
I have organized my entire existence around the rhythm of your heartbeat.
And I love you—" Her voice cracked, hard, a fissure running through granite.
"I love you so much that it scares me, because I can't tell where the love ends and the dependency begins, and if I can't tell, how can you? "
"I don't care about the—"
"I care." She said it with a fierceness that stopped my words cold.
"I care because I will not be the woman who stays because she's afraid to leave.
I will not be the woman who says I love you and wonders, in the quiet hours, if what she really means is I need you and I'm too broken to know the difference.
You deserve better than that. And so do I. "
The sound that came out of me wasn't a sound I'd ever made before.
It was the sound of a man who'd finally gotten everything he wanted and was watching it walk away.
The cosmic, unbearable justice of it. The woman I loved was leaving me for exactly the reason I'd told her to, and the fact that I'd changed my mind didn't change the fact that she hadn't.
That she'd taken my words and built them into a framework stronger than the one I'd intended, and now that framework was holding even as I tried to tear it down.
"I want a Daddy out of choice not out of necessity."
"How long?" My voice was barely functional. A rasp. A ruin.
"I don't know." The honesty of it—no false comfort, no arbitrary timeline, just the truth—was both devastating and exactly what I would have expected from her.
"A week. A month. However long it takes for me to sleep through the night alone and know that I can.
However long it takes for me to wake up in my own apartment and miss you because I want you, not because the silence is unbearable. "
"And then?"
She leaned forward and kissed me. Soft. Deliberate. Her lips against mine with the full, unambiguous intention of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing and why. Except she didn’t answer. She simply dressed, collected her phone and the case and the grocery bag and walked out of my life.