Nothing Personal -Libby
Twenty Seven
“What about you?” I asked softly, tilting my head to see his face. “Have you always been the dashing soldier who sweeps older women off their feet?”
My voice was light, teasing—a deliberate push against the gravity pulling at everything around us.
But the second the words left my lips, his body stiffened, a quick, involuntary reaction.
I’d struck a nerve. He recovered fast, exhaling, deliberately loosening his muscles.
It was the way someone trained to manage their reactions might act when they haven’t quite mastered managing them around you.
“Yeah… no,” he said, his words measured and low. A faint huff of breath escaped him—not quite a laugh, not quite a dismissal, but something caught between the two.
“I’ve got no clue about that, Libby.”
He paused.
I could track the hesitation in real time: the slight tension returning to his forearm, his tongue moving along the inside of his cheek—a tell I’d started cataloging without meaning to.
“I’ll be honest,” he finally said. “I’ve never been with anyone older. And I’ve always kept things… simple.”
I watched him carefully.
“Simple how?”
He didn’t look at me right away. His eyes stayed fixed on the unseen in the dark room, tracking something that wasn’t there.
“One-night stands,” he said, each word flat and plain. “Tinder hookups. In and out. No names, if I could help it.”
I pushed myself up slightly, shifting in his lap, bringing myself close enough to study his face properly, leaving him nowhere else to look.
There it is.
Not pride behind those words. Not indifference, nor the cocky detachment of someone who’d enjoyed the game and wanted credit for playing it well. Not the swagger of a man recounting a history he was secretly pleased with.
Shame.
Quiet and lived-in, settled into the corners of his expression, present, whether he acknowledged it or not.
“Why?” I asked, softer now, making it a question with no wrong answer.
His eyes flicked to mine, as if surprised by the gentleness.
He seemed to have expected judgment, already bracing for the careful re-evaluation playing out behind someone’s eyes while their expression remained politely neutral.
Disgust, perhaps. Or simply a quiet retreat, as if knowing this much was already too much.
I didn’t move.
I waited, my hand still resting against his chest, still and steady.
“Because then I never get attached,” he said, his voice low and even, stripped of emotion. “It stays easy. Nobody expects anything from you going in, so nobody gets disappointed when it’s over. Nobody looks at you like you owe them something you were never going to be able to give.”
His jaw worked slightly, a small motion he probably didn’t know he was making.
“My sister and other siblings are my only attachment. My parents have been gone for almost four years. That’s it. That’s the entire list.”
Something deep in my chest ached for him.
“That sounds lonely,” I said gently, and I meant it without a performative show of sympathy.
He shrugged, but the movement lacked conviction.
“It’s safe,” he corrected.
Neither of us spoke after that.
Safe.
Coming from a man who had walked through gunfire without flinching, who described the worst things I could imagine like running through a pre-mission checklist—item by item, nothing skipped, nothing dwelt on. A man who, in three weeks, had never once shown me anything resembling fear.
Except this.
“I’ve always been afraid of that part,” he admitted, his voice dropping so low that I had to hold perfectly still to catch every syllable, to not lose a single word to the ambient dark of the room.
“Feelings. What they do to you over time, how they change the way you think. What they cost you when you’re not paying attention, and suddenly you’re making decisions around them instead of around the thing that actually matters. ”
He swallowed, the movement visible in his throat.
“And what happens if something goes wrong,” he continued, the words coming slowly, as if he were translating them from a place he’d never let anyone else read. “If I’m thinking about someone instead of what’s in front of me. Or worse—if someone else pays for that.”
I took a slow breath, watching every small shift in his expression.
“I understand that,” I said.
* * *
After a while, I looked at him. He had a bemused expression on his face.
“What?”
He let out a chuckle, devoid of any genuine mirth.
“Nothing. Just lost in thought.”
“About?”
He shot me a quick sideways glance, a smirk playing on his lips.
“You’re not exactly my cup of tea, Libby.”
It hurt.
Square in the place I’d been careless enough to leave exposed. He hadn’t meant it. That was almost the worst part—that it had cost him nothing to say, that the words had come out so easily and weightless, the way only true things can when you’ve never had to think about them.
It was clearly a jest. A playful jab meant for the person sharing the couch so intimately that the mention of ‘type’ had already turned into a shared inside joke, highlighting the undeniable connection between us.
I didn’t move. Didn’t pull away, didn’t let my expression shift. I kept my hand flat against his shirt as though it hadn’t just been told it didn’t belong.
But the sting spread as if I had been struck.
He kept going.
“But somehow… you’re the closest I’ve ever come to actually feeling something real. Something that doesn’t evaporate the second it’s over and leave me with nothing but the ceiling and the quiet.”
My lungs simply forgot what they were supposed to do next.
“The sex,” he added, his voice dropping to a near whisper, as if seeking an anchor in something undeniable, something that couldn’t be disputed or misconstrued.
“It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.
I don’t know what to do with it. Libby, you do something to me that is both amazing and infuriating.
Why now? Why, when the world is ending, am I discovering something beyond anything I’ve ever known? ”
I offered no reply.
I couldn’t, not really. The words eluded me, or perhaps there were too many of them.
“Because you’re not my cup of tea” still resonated. It lingered at the core of everything that had transpired since, radiating, occupying a space I hadn’t realized I’d cleared until he filled it, only to tell me in the same breath that I didn’t belong there.
“But—” he continued, his tone shifting, hardening. The soldier within him stepped forward, efficiently taking command. “Don’t get attached to me, Libby.”
I met his gaze fully.
“Finn—”
“I mean it,” he said, not harshly, not with manufactured distance, but with a settled conviction. “I don’t want to hurt you. I’m not saying this to manipulate you. I mean it as plainly as I know how.”
A flicker crossed his eyes then—quick, unguarded, and profoundly real—revealing everything the rest of him was striving to conceal.
He caught it, reining it back. But not before I’d seen it, already tucking it away in the quiet corner where I kept all the parts of him he hadn’t intended to show me.
“And until we reach somewhere even remotely safe,” he added, his words clipped and careful, as if rationed, “I need to stay focused. Completely. I can’t afford to—”
The sentence dissolved unfinished, swallowed by the remnants of his composure.
But I heard what he left unsaid. Heard it in the silence that followed.
I can’t afford to care about you the way I’m starting to.
Hurt now sat in my throat, accompanied by something else: understanding. And the fear he’d just handed me by naming his own.
He shifted beneath me.
“I need you to promise me something.”
I froze, my thumb ceasing its small, unconscious movement against his shirt.
“What?”
“If it comes down to it…” He spoke slowly, each word chosen with a deliberateness that suggested careful rehearsal. “If I have to make a call. If I have to get you, Fiona, and Lily out of whatever it is we’re walking into—”
A muscle in his jaw jumped beneath the skin, a small, involuntary betrayal of everything he was working to keep contained.
“I need to know you’ll let me do it. That you won’t try to stop me or save me. I need you to let me protect you.”
I didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. Somewhere in the room, a clock ticked, a sound I hadn’t noticed before.
“Finn—”
“I need you to promise me.” His voice dropped, raw and stripped of all defense.
His grip tightened on my arms—not enough to bruise or hurt, but enough that I felt every individual finger, every point of contact, every ounce of desperation bleeding into his hands even as he fought to keep it from his voice.
“If I tell you to go, you go immediately. You don’t slow down, you don’t stop to look back, you don’t stand there waiting to see how it ends.
You take them and you move, and you don’t stop moving. ”
His eyes locked onto mine, holding them, refusing to let me look away, soften the directness, or retreat into something easier.
Not cold.
Not distant.
Terrified. Openly, visibly, undeniably terrified.
“I need to know you’ll actually listen to me when it matters,” he said. “That you won’t hesitate. That you’ll take them and go, and you won’t look back, and you won’t wait for something that might not—”
He stopped, leaving the sentence unfinished. He didn’t need to.
A thin, taut beat stretched between us.
His voice broke on the next word—just one—then he steadied himself and continued.
“I need to know that you’re going to be safe, Libby. That’s all. That’s the only thing I’m asking you to give me.”
This wasn’t a man pushing me away because my proximity was inconvenient, or because I was too much, or because he’d decided I wasn’t worth the complexity of whatever this had become.