“Adrian…”
The sound of my name almost broke me again. I pressed the heel of my palm to my eyes, but the tears broke anyway. “I—I thought I had more time,” I said, breath shaking. “To fix myself. To make this right. I thought if I worked hard enough, saved enough people, held everything together—” I swiped at the tears and snot running down my face. “I don’t know how to stop trying to save everyone. I don’t know how to put it down. I don’t know how to choose… just us. I want to. God, I want to. But I’m scared I’m gonna fall back into old patterns and lose you to something preventable.”
His eyes softened, but he didn’t interrupt.
“I need help,” I forced out. Saying it felt like peeling off skin. “I need to talk to someone professionally. About why I keep doing this to myself, to us. I can’t just promise I’ll be better and hope it sticks. Can’t keep pretending I’m the exception to the rules I tell everyone else to follow. I need?—”
My voice cracked apart. I stared up at the ceiling and drew in a ragged breath.
His face crumpled with quiet, heart-puncturing tenderness. “Okay,” he whispered. “Okay. Then we’ll do that.”
I loosened my grip, and the papers fell to the floor. “I never want to gamble with you again. I can’t—” My voicefailed, so I tried again. “You’re not another case. You’re not something for me to manage or fix. You’re the person I… I love. I can’t lose you, Eli. Not because of my own shit. Not again.”
Eli’s hand slid up, thumb brushing my cheek with a gentleness that absolutely gutted me.
“You won’t lose me,” he whispered. “Not if we’re fixing things together.”
My chest caved in with relief and grief at the same time. I pressed my head to his, clinging to him like a lifeline.
“We’re right here, Adrian. Both of us. We’re not done.”
Eli grabbed the papers and just stared at them, jaw tightening. I could see the war inside him, the urge to tear them up, to make a grand gesture, to pretend we could erase everything with resolve.
“I hate these,” he whispered.
“I know.”
“I want to rip them to shreds.”
“I know,” I said again, helping him to his feet, my hand warm in his. “But tearing them up doesn’t fix what put them here.”
His fingers twitched, fists clenching the edges. “I just… I don’t want to think about losing you anymore.”
“And you won’t. But we don’t erase the paperwork. Not yet.”
He breathed out shakily, leaning into me. “Then what do we do?”
“We set a timeframe,” I murmured. “We reevaluate. We actually talk. We get help. We try, for real this time. With both of us doing the work. Not just me running myself into theground, and not just you quietly waiting for the bottom to fall out.”
Eli swallowed hard. “And you’re… not leaving?”
“Not unless you tell me to.” I ran my lips over his ear, nipping, sucking a kiss to the tender spot just below. “I’m here. And I want us. But I want us healthy. I want us equal. I want us to last.”
He shivered at the contact. Slowly, painfully, Eli unfolded the papers and set them on the dresser—not torn, not thrown away. Just set aside.
A promise to face the hard parts, not pretend they're gone. I had a lot of work to do to earn back his trust. Nothing mattered more to me.
He pressed his head to my collarbone, exhaling as if he’d been holding that breath for weeks. “Okay,” he whispered. “We try.”
I wrapped my arms around him, pulling him in with a sureness I didn’t feel but desperately wanted to grow into. The gesture was ordinary, but that simple touch was loaded with emotional security. More tears threatened to spill, tears that expelled all of our loneliness and grief. Tears that would wash us clean.
“Yeah,” I murmured into his hair. “We try.”
Because trying didn’t feel like a countdown to failure. It felt like a beginning.
Chapter 34
Breaking The Silence
