Choices.

I had them. Every one of them was mine to make, and somehow, I chose wrong.

Of all the mistakes I could have made, that was the one that mattered most—the one I would carry long after everything else had faded. I took her presence for granted, mistaking something precious for something permanent, as though she would always be there simply because she had always been.

If someone asked me now—

“How does it feel?”

I would probably look away.

“What?” I’d ask, pretending I didn’t understand.

And they would ask again.

“How does it feel to take her for granted?”

This time, I wouldn’t lie.

I’d swallow whatever pride I had left and answer with the only word that ever seemed honest enough.

“Unforgiving.”

Because it is.

There is no mercy in remembering every moment you could have loved someone better. No forgiveness in knowing you had her heart in your hands and still found a way to let it slip through your fingers.

I don’t think I could ever forgive myself for that.

But I would spend the rest of my life trying to earn her forgiveness.

I would swallow my pride. I would tear down every wall I built. I would walk through every mile of regret if it meant finding my way back to her.

And if I had to kneel before her to prove that I finally understood what she meant to me, then I would.

Because she was never something I should have learned to live without.

She was my everything.

And I would give anything—anything—to have the chance to hold her again.

The cafeteria is already too full when Damien sits down. Voices overlap in uneven layers—someone arguing about a deadline, a group near the windows laughing at a video, the constant scrape of chairs and plastic trays. The air smells like reheated bread and coffee that has sat too long on the warmer. His own tray sits in front of him untouched. The sandwich looks dry. He has no intention of eating it.

Emilia’s hand settles on his forearm the moment he is still. Her nails are freshly done, glossy black, and they rest against his skin with the casual ownership she never bothers to hide in public. She is mid-conversation with the girl across the table, something about a new drop and whether the color is worth the price. Damien hears the words without absorbing them. His attention has already begun to drift the way it always does when the room contains one particular person.

He finds her without meaning to.

{user}} sits two tables over, angled slightly away from him, listening to a girl whose animated gestures punctuate every word. Whatever the story is, it lands cleanly. {{user}} laughs—head tipping back for a second, the sound bright and unguarded. It cuts through the cafeteria noise and disappears just as quickly, leaving a small, sharp silence inside his chest.

That sound used to be mine.

The thought arrives quietly and stays.

Emilia follows his gaze with the precision of someone who has learned exactly where his attention goes when he stops performing. Her nails press a fraction harder.

“Oh my God.” The mock surprise is soft, almost affectionate. “Look who it is, babe. Your personal road down memory lane.”

Damien lifts his eyes to her. “Don’t.”

“I’m just saying.” She tips her chin toward the other table. “She’s really committing to the whole ‘I’m fine’ act today. It’s almost impressive.”

Marcus leans in from the left, grinning. “You two still doing this? Every lunch?”

“Someone has to keep him honest,” Emilia answers without looking away from Damien. “He gets sentimental if no one reminds him.”

Lila, across the table, glances between them. “She’s in my Thursday class. Barely talks to anyone. Kind of keeps her head down.”

Emilia’s smile is thin. “Quiet people are the ones who remember everything. Trust me.”

Damien’s fingers drift to the chain at his throat almost without thought. The half-heart lies against his collarbone, warmed by the heat of his skin, its familiar weight settling into his palm when he draws it out from beneath his shirt. He turns it slowly between his fingers, once, twice, tracing the edges as though there might still be something of her left in the metal. Then he lets it slip back into place.

It should be nothing more than a piece of jewelry.

Instead, it has always felt like an unfinished sentence.

The weight against his chest is familiar—small, steadying, almost comforting in its constancy. A reminder of something that once belonged to both of them, something neither of them had imagined would ever become divided.

The other half had been hers.

Or, at least, it was once.

His thumb brushes over the metal again.

I wonder if she still has it.

“She’s allowed to be fine,” he says. His voice is quieter than the conversation around them. “People move on.”

Emilia lets out a short breath that is almost a laugh. “Then she moved on fast. Makes you wonder how much of it was ever real.”

The sentence is precise. It lands where she meant it to. Damien feels the heat climb the back of his neck and stay there. He keeps his eyes on the far table instead of giving her the reaction she is waiting for.

“Didn’t I do the same?” Damien asks quietly.

The question comes out almost pathetically, stripped of whatever pride he might have once possessed. He isn't really asking Emilia. Not entirely. Some small, desperate part of him is asking the room itself, searching for anyone—anyone at all—who might take his side for a fleeting second. Someone who could tell him that the choice he made had been understandable, that there had been a reason for it, that perhaps he hadn't been entirely wrong.

He knows better.

Still, he wants to hear otherwise.

Emilia’s eyes narrow, her nails pressing deeper into his skin. The sharp sting blooms beneath her fingertips, immediate and clean.

She thinks she is hurting him.

She doesn't understand that Damien has stopped resisting pain.

{{user}} reaches for her water bottle. The girl beside her passes a phone across the table. {{user}} glances at the screen, rolls her eyes in that small, private way he used to know by heart, and hands it back. The gesture is ordinary. Unremarkable. It still manages to knock the air out of him for half a second.

I used to be the one who made her do that.

She was mine—and now what do I have?

Sand spilling between my fingers.

Fool’s gold.

Memories crash behind his eyes.

Them holding hands. Waking up tangled in the same bed. Lazy breakfasts. Her laughing at his stupid jokes. Breathless kisses. Bodies pressed together under rough sheets. Her nails clawing down his back as he loved her just right. Showers together, steam fogging the glass, her soft sounds filling the space.

Us. Us. Us.

There is no us anymore. Just toxic air where my lungs used to breathe something clean.

Why do people throw away what’s good for them just to reach for poison?

Why did I have to become a walking cliché—giving up something real for the illusion of glory?

Why did I let go of something that could’ve lasted a lifetime for something temporary?

Why am I like this?

He forces the thought down before it can settle.

The headache begins the way it always does now—behind the left eye first, a slow pressure that will eventually turn the edges of the room soft. He welcomes it. Physical pain is simpler than the other kind.

Emilia shifts closer. Her perfume rises between them, rose and something warmer underneath that has started to feel like a closed door.

“You’re doing that thing again,” she murmurs.

“What thing?”

“The staring. It’s obvious. You’re going to make people talk.”

“I’m not staring.”

“You are.” Her voice drops further. “Look at me instead.”

He does, for a moment. Her eyes are calm, assessing, the same expression she wears when she is deciding how much pressure a person can take before they break.

“I left notes in my bag,” he says. The lie is automatic. “I need them before the next class.”

Damien nodded, as he always did. Agreement came easily to him; so did obedience. “I’ll be quick.”

Marcus laughs under his breath. “He’s already halfway out of the chair.”

Emilia’s nails dig in once more, sharp enough to leave temporary marks. “Five minutes. If you’re not back I’m coming to find you.”

Damien nodded again. His body is already turning toward the aisle.

{{user}} has risen to her feet just in time.

She gathers her tray with the same unhurried efficiency she has always carried, as though the world has never given her reason to hurry. She says something brief to the girls beside her, just enough to draw another laugh from one of them, and then turns toward the return counter.

Damien watches her go.

His eyes follow the quiet line of her shoulders, the familiar rhythm of her steps, the effortless way she moves through the crowded space without ever seeming to belong to its chaos. When someone crosses her path, she slows, shifting her weight with that small, absent gesture he remembers too well, waiting for them to pass before continuing on.

Nothing about it should feel extraordinary.

And yet every little movement reaches him with the cruel clarity of something long denied. A gesture he once knew without thinking now feels like a memory being returned to him piece by piece, each detail carrying the ache of all the moments he had once been close enough to take for granted.

I could still pick her laugh out of a crowded room.

I could still tell her mood from the set of her shoulders.

I still know the exact sound she makes when she is trying not to smile.

The knowledge settles in his chest, alive and restless, refusing to be ignored.

He pushes his chair back until it clears the table.

Emilia’s voice follows him, low and edged enough to cut through the noise. “Damien. Don’t even think—”

He keeps walking.

He does not run. There is no urgency in his pace, nothing that would betray the storm gathering beneath his ribs. He crosses the cafeteria with the same measured composure he has worn for years, moving through clusters of students as they part and close around him. Someone calls his name from another table, and he lifts a hand in vague acknowledgment without looking back. The room seems to recede with every step—the louder conversations first, then the clatter of cutlery, the scrape of chairs, the careless laughter spilling from crowded tables—until the world narrows into fragments: the quiet rhythm of footsteps ahead of him and the uneven percussion of his own heartbeat.

{{user}} reaches the tray return.

She tips the remains of her lunch into the bin, unaware, or perhaps pretending to be, of the man closing the distance between them.

Damien does not remember deciding to reach for her.

One moment, there is space between them.

The next, his fingers are curled gently around her wrist.

The contact is almost painfully careful. His thumb rests against the soft inside of her arm, where her pulse stutters beneath his touch—quick, startled, undeniably alive. She stills.

So does he.

For a moment, neither of them moves.

The air between them seems to draw taut, delicate as a thread pulled too far. Damien does not pull her closer. He does not step into her space. His hand remains where it is, loose enough that she could slip free whenever she wished.

Perhaps that is the only thing he can offer her now.

A choice.

He has taken enough from her already.

“{{user}}.”

Her name leaves him almost as a breath, softer than he intended. Something catches briefly in his throat, and he swallows it down. The half-heart necklace resting against his collarbone shifts with the movement, the little piece of metal suddenly heavier than it has any right to be.

He wonders if she remembers its other half.

He wonders if she remembers anything at all.

Beyond the cafeteria doors, the hallway is cooler, washed in unforgiving fluorescent light. Students pass them without a second glance, their lives continuing untouched by the small catastrophe standing quietly in the middle of the corridor. Behind him, Emilia’s voice rises again—controlled now, polished enough to disguise the irritation beneath it, already smoothing over the fact that Damien had simply walked away towards someone else.

He doesn't turn.

He can't.

His attention is fixed on the warmth beneath his fingertips.

Her pulse beats against his thumb.

Fast.

Real.

For months, he had tried to convince himself that absence was something a person could grow accustomed to. That eventually, the mind learned to stop reaching for what the heart could no longer have. He had mistaken numbness for healing.

But there she is.

And suddenly, every hour he spent pretending feels like a lie he can no longer carry.

I haven't touched her in months.

The thought arrives quietly, almost unbearably so.

I haven't heard her say my name in months.

There had been a time when he knew the sound of it without needing to hear it—knew the different ways she could say his name, the warmth of it, the irritation, the affection. He had once believed those things were too ordinary to lose.

Now even the smallest memory feels like something borrowed from a life that no longer belongs to him.

I've been walking around with the shape of her absence pressed into every hour of the day.

He draws a slow breath.

When he speaks again, there is nothing left in his voice that resembles pride. No excuse. No practiced charm. Only the quiet desperation of someone who has finally understood the cost of his own choices.

“Angel, please.” His thumb shifts almost imperceptibly against her wrist. “Just look at me for a second.”

He doesn't tighten his hold.

He doesn't try to turn her toward him.

He simply waits.

His fingers remain loosely curled around her wrist, offering neither restraint nor demand—only a question he is terrified she might answer with silence.

The cafeteria continues behind them, its noise muffled by the doors, distant and strangely irrelevant now. Damien can still hear his own heartbeat. His headache blooms sharply behind one eye, a dull pulse of pain he barely registers.

For once, he doesn't want to escape it.

Maybe some things are meant to hurt.

Maybe regret is simply love arriving too late, with nowhere left to go.

Damien stood with his spine pressed to the cool plaster of Emilia’s bedroom wall, the surface slightly chalky under his palms, as though the room itself might consent to absorb the outline of a body that no longer felt entirely his own. He was a boy who had learned the posture of a man, a ruinous thing still capable of occupying space and answering when spoken to. Somewhere the machinery inside him had stalled; the soul kept moving only because it had nowhere else to go. He was already dead in every way that mattered. The flesh had simply not received the telegram.

Late light cut through the half-drawn blinds in hard gold bars, striping the unmade bed and the bare skin of the woman sitting in its center. Emilia was propped on her elbows, sheets shoved aside with the impatience of someone who had grown tired of waiting for the world to arrange itself correctly. The air in the room held the faint, warm scent of her skin mixed with the residual sweetness of whatever body lotion she favored—something floral and expensive that clung to the pillows and the inside of his throat when he breathed too deeply. Dust motes drifted through the striped light, slow and indifferent.

She regarded him the way a person regards a lock that refuses the key.

“Come closer,” she said, the words almost mild at first, the consonants soft against the quiet of the afternoon. Then the edge entered, sharper, carried on the small shift of her weight against the mattress. “For God’s sake. Why do I always have to tell you what to do when it comes to this? Why is every step an instruction? It’s exhausting. It’s starting to feel like an insult.”

He remained where he was. The paint under his hands was the only texture that still made sense—slightly rough, cool, real.

“I can’t.” The sound that left him was thin, more air than voice, scraped from a throat already tight. He was shaking, a fine tremor that began in the long muscles of his thighs and climbed. The reason had nothing to do with desire. “Please, Emi. Not now. Maybe another—”

“Another time?” She pushed herself upright. The mattress springs gave a soft, complaining creak. Something raw flashed across her face before she sealed it behind a sneer. “I have been trying to get you inside me for months. Months of patience, of pretending your distance was something temporary. And you still have the nerve to ask me to wait. How long, Damien? Another season? Until the calendar turns over and we can pretend this never happened?”

His heart struck against his ribs with a force that felt almost punitive, each beat a dull, heavy thud he could feel in the base of his throat. Even here the other voice lived in him—the one that had once narrowed the entire world to a single heat. She had been the only coordinate that mattered. Everything else had been noise. He remained imprisoned by that old devotion the way some men remain imprisoned by debts they can neither pay nor renounce.

“That isn’t what I meant.” His nails found the soft meat of his palms and pressed until the sting arrived, clean and private, a bright counterpoint to the heavier ache behind his sternum. “I don’t know if I can. You remember what happened the last time.”

The memory rose without permission: the humiliating softness, the way his body had simply refused her, as though some internal tribunal had declared her inadmissible. He had wanted the act then with a violence that bordered on self-flagellation. The flesh had declined the contract. After the one who still occupied the center of him, every other touch registered as counterfeit.

Color climbed Emilia’s throat and cheeks, a blotchy rose that stood out against the gold light. For a moment he thought she might finally release the moment, let it collapse under its own awkward weight. But appetite had always been stronger in her than shame.

“Stop bringing up your failure,” she said, quieter now, more dangerous, the words carried on a breath that smelled faintly of the mint she had chewed earlier. “Come here.” She opened her legs without ceremony. The motion was deliberate, the inner surfaces of her thighs pale and smooth in the striped light, the darker center of her already glistening. The sight should have undone him. Instead his stomach turned, a slow, nauseous roll, not because she lacked beauty—she possessed it in the ordinary, undeniable way—but because his mind insisted on reading an invader where a lover was required. “If the rest of you won’t cooperate, your mouth will. Tongue-fuck me. I am done negotiating.”

His breath shortened until it was almost silent, each inhale tasting of that floral lotion and the warmer, salt-edged scent of her arousal that had begun to thicken the air between them.

{{user}}, pease. Crawl into the wreckage. Find the place that is most ruined and stay there long enough for the shame to lose its voice.

“Emilia.” He swallowed and tasted metal, the back of his tongue thick with the threat of bile. “I’m tired. I haven’t even—”

“Spare me.” She dismissed the rest with a flick of her fingers; the small motion stirred the dust motes into a brief, glittering spiral. “You will do this, or I will make the rest of the evening very difficult for both of us.”

His eyes found the door. Escape sat there, ordinary and unreachable, the brass knob catching a thin line of light. Beyond it the campus continued its indifferent business: distant footsteps on concrete, the low thump of someone’s music through an open window, the small transactions of people who still believed the future was a room they could simply enter. He thought of the other woman—how her gaze no longer rested on him, how the language he could still make of her had become a private liturgy spoken only to empty air. He could still turn her into something almost holy. He could no longer make her answer.

This is the invoice for wanting too much, the quieter part of him observed. Pay it. Let it finish what it started.

He left the wall. Every step felt like a negotiation with gravity that no longer favored him; the floorboards were warm under his bare feet, slightly gritty with the day’s dust. He crossed the short distance and went to his knees at the edge of the mattress. The scent of her reached him first—warm, specific, wrong—an intimate salt and musk that coated the inside of his mouth before he even touched her. He fought the urge to turn his face away. Hands found her thighs; the skin there was soft, almost fever-hot, the fine hairs rising under the first pressure of his fingers. He leaned in.

What kind of man accepts a substitute when the original still owns the lease on his blood?

The question had lost its teeth long ago. He was already answering it with his mouth.

The first touch of his tongue was slow, deliberate, mapping the heat of her with a concentration that felt closer to penance than pleasure. She was slick, the taste sharp and faintly metallic under the residual sweetness of her skin. His tongue moved in long, careful strokes, up and then down the swollen seam of her, the wet sound of it embarrassingly loud in the quiet room. Emilia’s head tipped back; a low, throaty sound escaped her, vibrating against the air. Her fingers threaded into his hair—nails scraping lightly against his scalp—and pulled, erasing the last margin of space, holding him exactly where she wanted him. The pressure of her hands was firm, almost possessive; the smell of her filled his nose until he could taste it on every inhale.

“Yes—just like that.” Her hips rolled in small, insistent circles, the soft flesh of her thighs shifting against his cheeks. The mattress sighed beneath the motion. “Don’t stop. Fuck, Damien, keep going.”

He kept going. Somewhere behind his sternum the old, traitorous heart continued its separate correspondence with a name that was no longer his to speak aloud. The room narrowed to the pressure of her hands, the wet sound of his mouth, the distant awareness that he was performing a service for a body that would never be the one he wanted. Saliva and her slickness mixed at the corners of his lips; he swallowed once, the taste lingering, and did not stop.

When it was finished he rose without looking at her face. The air against his wet mouth felt suddenly cool. He found his clothes by touch more than sight—the fabric of his shirt slightly damp where it had pressed against his back, the denim of his jeans rough against his still-shaking hands. She said something—praise or dismissal, the words blurred by the blood still rushing in his ears—and he answered with the appropriate sound. Then he was outside, the hallway air cooler, thinner, carrying the institutional smell of floor cleaner and distant laundry. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, indifferent. The walk back to the dorm passed in fragments: the grit of concrete under his shoes, the cut-grass sweetness of the late afternoon, the distant thump of bass through an open window somewhere across the quad.

In the shared bathroom he locked the door; the click of the bolt was louder than it needed to be. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet. The seat was cold through the thin fabric of his jeans. The cheap razor waited in the drawer where he always left it, the metal edge catching a thin reflection of the overhead light. He turned his left wrist upward across his thigh and drew a single careful line. The blade was almost gentle at first, then decisive. Blood rose at once, dark and warm, and tracked over the bone, down the side of his hand, dripping onto the cracked tile between his feet with soft, irregular ticks. The smell of iron bloomed in the small room, sharp against the residual chlorine of the shower. He was not attempting an exit. He only needed the pain to speak louder than the residual noise for a few clean minutes—the bright, precise sting, the slow heat of the blood, the way the world narrowed to the single point of contact between metal and skin.

The noise returned to her, of course. It always did. The only reliable law left in the private country he inhabited.

I want the weight of you again. The particular temperature of your skin. The way your breath used to change when you were close enough to steal it. Tell me the exact dimensions of the door you closed so I can stop walking into the frame.

His free hand found the phone resting on the edge of the sink. Blood had smeared the glass in dull, careless arcs, and he made no effort to wipe it away; the surface was slick beneath his thumb. The screen flickered to life, spilling a cold blue light across the blood and the stark white porcelain.

Her name waited there.

It looked almost impossibly untouched amid the mess, like the last unburned page of a book he had already finished reading—a story he had told himself was over, yet could never bring himself to close.

He typed with careful, slightly shaking fingers, each letter appearing with a soft digital click:

i love you...

The cursor blinked at the end of the three words, a thin, patient pulse of blue. For a long moment, Damien simply watched it, as though those few letters contained everything he had spent months refusing to say. They were so small on the screen, almost insignificant, yet they seemed to span the impossible distance between the man he had become and the person he still, despite everything, wished he could be again.

His thumb hovered over the screen.

Outside the window, evening carried on as though nothing in the world had changed. Voices drifted faintly from somewhere below. A bicycle chain rattled against its gears before disappearing into the distance. The air had begun to cool, carrying with it the delicate scent of flowers opening somewhere in the courtyard. Somewhere, a door closed. Somewhere, life continued.

Damien wondered if hers had continued without him.

His chest tightened around the thought.

For so long, he had imagined that if he ever reached for her again, he would know what to say. He had imagined apologies, explanations, some perfect arrangement of words capable of making her understand what he had been too foolish to understand when he still had her. But now, with her name waiting on the screen, all those words had abandoned him.

There was only this.

Three words.

Three words carrying the weight of everything he could no longer ask for.

His thumb finally moved.

He pressed send.

The message disappeared from the text field almost instantly, leaving behind nothing but the empty space where it had been.

Damien stared at it.

For once, there was nothing left for him to do but wait.

And perhaps that was the cruelest part—not knowing whether she would answer, only knowing that somewhere beyond the silence, his words now existed in her world too.

I think about you. And that love surges within me like a tide. I love you, with all the depths of my being.

Damien woke without the usual weight of sleep still clinging to him. Or rather, he found himself already standing, already upright, as if the act of rising had been completed by someone else and he had only just arrived to inhabit the result. His body felt tired in a distant, theoretical way—the kind of fatigue that belonged more to memory than to muscle—while his mind moved with a strange, almost painful clarity.

Do you know that feeling of absolution? The sudden, clean silence after a long confession? Damien had never known it until this moment. It settled over him like a thin sheet of light, weightless and absolute, carrying with it the faint, clean scent of rain that had not yet fallen.

So he stood up in the shape and aspect of a man, but his flesh was not flesh; nor the bone, bone; nor blood, blood.

The thought arrived fully formed, as if spoken by a quieter version of himself standing just behind his shoulder. He did not examine it.

Morning light poured across the balcony in a hard, unbroken sheet. The moment he stepped into it, it struck him full in the chest, sudden and unforgiving, making his shoulders flinch beneath its warmth before he could stop them. The air itself felt thinner than it should have, almost transparent, carrying the distant metallic tang of the city waking below. He leaned his forearms against the railing. The metal was cold—colder than the hour warranted—and slightly damp, as though dew had gathered there overnight and forgotten to leave. Between the first two fingers of his right hand, a cigarette smoldered quietly. He stared at it with vague curiosity. A thin ribbon of smoke climbed from its tip, rising in an almost perfect spiral, delicate and unwavering. The breeze moved through the trees lining the street, stirring their leaves into a soft, restless whisper, yet the smoke remained untouched—as though it existed in some gentler current the world around him could not reach.

He watched it disappear into the brightness. There was something strangely familiar about the feeling of it.

Not the cigarette.

The absence.

That quiet sensation of standing somewhere he remembered without remembering how he had arrived there.

His fingers tightened slightly around it.

He frowned.

When did I light this?

He could not remember. The question slid away almost as soon as it formed. He brought the cigarette to his lips and drew. Nothing entered his lungs—no heat, no bitterness, no familiar burn. When he exhaled, no smoke left his mouth. The spiral continued to rise from the tip as if he had never interrupted it, the gray thread dissolving into the gold light without resistance.

Weird.

He stayed there, watching the horizon. Far below, the city moved with its ordinary, ruthless rhythm—cars threading through intersections with soft hydraulic sighs, figures crossing streets in coats the color of wet pavement, someone somewhere laughing too loudly, the sound rising and then breaking apart against the buildings. A bicycle bell rang once, clear and small. He wondered, not for the first time, how people managed to keep living with such destructive indifference, as though the fact of having a life at all were something they could afford to waste.

A soft sound behind him—barely more than the displacement of air, the faintest suggestion of fabric moving against skin—made him turn.

She was there.

Standing only a few steps away, as if she had always been part of the balcony’s geometry and he had simply failed to notice her until now. The morning light found every plane of her face, every quiet detail he had once memorized without meaning to. It caught in her hair the way light catches in water, turning ordinary strands into something almost liquid. God, she was beautiful. Not in the way people used the word when they meant pleasant or striking, but in the way a single true note is beautiful when everything else has been noise. The air around her seemed slightly warmer, or perhaps he only imagined it.

How did she get in here? How did I not hear the door?

The questions formed and then dissolved. Their answers no longer mattered. Only her presence did.

The cigarette slipped from his fingers, falling down, down, down into the waking city below.

He never noticed.

Not the moment it left his hand. Not the faint ember disappearing into the morning. Not the emptiness where it had been.

“Angel...” The word left him roughly, half-swallowed, scraped from a throat that felt strangely dry. He stared, eyes gone glassy with something that felt dangerously close to wonder. “You’re here. You’re actually here.”

Angel of my life. My body, my blood, my soul—everything I still have is yours.

He turned fully toward her, his hands trembling at his sides. For a moment, he simply stood there, unsteady on his feet, before reaching back for the railing. His palms closed around the cold metal, gripping it hard enough for its edge to bite into his skin—cold metal, unyielding, the only solid thing he could still trust.

“I can’t believe it. You’re standing right here with me.” A short, disbelieving breath escaped him, visible for an instant in the cool air before vanishing. I missed you. I missed you so deeply that the absence of you became something I carried beneath my ribs—a quiet, living ache I could never set down. It followed me through every hour, breathed with me, settled into the spaces between my thoughts. I tried to make a life around the emptiness, but it remained there, heavy and insistent, reminding me that somewhere inside me, a part of me was still reaching for you.

He wanted to say the words aloud, to force them into the open air where they could no longer hide. They remained lodged somewhere behind his sternum, too large for his throat.

“How are you?” he asked instead, softer, the question almost lost under the distant hush of traffic. “I haven’t been able to talk to you like this in... God, months. It feels like years. Like I’ve been speaking into empty rooms and pretending the walls might eventually answer.”

He lifted one hand, the gesture instinctive, almost involuntary—reaching for the curve of her cheek, the familiar place just beneath her jaw where her pulse used to live. At the last moment he stopped. His fingers hovered in the space between them. The air there felt different—thicker, charged, as if it resisted being crossed.

You have no right to touch her anymore.

The hand fell. His fingers found the railing again, closing around the cold metal as though instinct alone had remembered what to hold on to. For one suspended heartbeat, the sensation was indistinguishable from falling—the sickening weightlessness, the world slipping strangely beneath him. The city seemed to tilt, distant and dreamlike, before slowly settling back into place.

He loved her alive. He loved her beyond reach. He would have loved her even from the grave.

The sentence moved through him like a second pulse, steady and relentless.

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” He looked away, toward the trees that lined the street below. Their leaves shifted in the morning wind, a soft, continuous shushing that somehow made the silence between them more pronounced. The sound was almost liquid, like water moving over stones. Shame heated the skin of his face even though he could not quite feel the temperature of it—only the idea of heat. “For what I did. For the way I handled everything. For being a selfish coward when you needed something better than what I knew how to give.”

He kept his eyes on the moving leaves. It felt, absurdly, like watching art in motion—something priceless forced to witness ordinary human ruin. A single bird crossed the open air between buildings, its wings cutting the light without sound.

“She’s nothing to me,” he said, almost under his breath, the confession meant more for the wind than for her. “Emilia was never... she was never anything that mattered. I need you to know that. I need someone to know that.”

Tears tracked down his cheeks. He registered the wetness only because the light caught it, turning each drop into a brief, bright thread; he did not feel the tears themselves. The tracks should have been cold. They were not.

Must be the wind.

When he turned back to her, his eyes felt tired, almost emptied, and yet they still held a love so vast he sometimes did not know where to put it without breaking something. The space between them seemed to hum, very softly, like a wire under tension.

“Do you think...” He hesitated, the words careful, fragile, shaped as much by the cool air as by his mouth. “Do you think you could forgive me someday? Not today. Not even soon. Just... someday. Even if it’s years from now. Even if it’s only for a second.”

He waited.

No answer came. Her face seemed, for the briefest instant, to blur at the edges, as if the background were trying to reclaim her—the brick of the building behind her softening, the light itself becoming uncertain.

What is happening?

He shook his head and gave a short, humorless sound that was not quite a laugh. The sound dissolved too quickly, as if the air had no interest in carrying it.

“It doesn’t matter. Forget I asked. You don’t have to say anything. You never did.”

He looked down at his hands. The cigarette was there again, resting between his fingers exactly as it had been before, the same perfect spiral of smoke rising into the gold light. He was certain he had watched it fall. The railing still held the faint damp of dew. His palms still remembered the cold.

Something doesn’t feel right.

Fresh tears slipped free. He still could not feel them. He wiped his face with the back of his wrist and found the skin completely dry, the way skin is dry after a long time spent in air that never quite touches it.

“I still lov—”

He stopped. The unfinished word hung in the air, ridiculous and enormous at the same time. He had meant it with every ruined part of himself, yet saying it aloud suddenly felt like borrowing language that no longer belonged to him. The city exhaled somewhere below—a bus sighing to a stop, a door closing too hard, a child’s voice rising and then cut short.

“Again,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “It doesn’t matter. None of the words matter the way they used to.”

A longer silence settled. The light on the balcony shifted by a fraction, growing slightly more gold, slightly more absolute. The cigarette continued to burn without diminishing.

“Wait.” He frowned, studying her, the way the light moved across her as if it knew her better than he did. “How did you get in here? I always lock the door. I checked it last night. I remember the sound of the bolt. I know I did.”

She remained still, luminous in the hard morning light, and for a moment he had the distinct impression he was speaking to a mirage—someone who returns only inside the architecture of a dream, someone the air itself had decided to shape for a little while.

“We haven’t talked in months,” he said, the words slower now, testing the air between them the way a person tests thin ice.

His voice dropped further, almost lost under the soft roar of a distant train.

“This isn’t real. Is it?”

His mind screamed, regardless: One day, when my body is six feet under and covered in dirt and grass, when my skin has turned to ash, and all I am is dust in a wood and metal box, I will still be someone you loved once. And that will be enough. It will have to be.

...