“But I am still mad at you, Zane.”
“I know.”
“No.” The word comes out sharp and final, and there she is. That girl. The one with teeth. The one I thought I had lost along the way. “You hurt me.”
“I know.”
“And I get it now. I get that in your fucked-up martyr brain, you thought you were giving me a life. But you didn’t give me anything, Zane. You took the choice from me. You took what happened between us and made it ugly because you decided I would survive hate better than hope.”
I step closer, enough to make the words land. “Just so you know, I survived both.”
His eyes close for half a second.
When they open, the pain in them nearly cracks the wall I almost finished building. I register it in my chest like a fault line. That specific tenderness for someone who has hurt you, a tenderness that never fully goes away no matter how much you need it to.
I turn away before it can do anything more. Because both truths are warring inside me right now, their knives drawn, and I don’t know which one will bleed first. I am still mad at him. I am still so completely, stupidly in love with him. Those two things occupy the same space, tearing at each other, and I can’t afford to stand in front of him when one of them wins.
“I have to go,” I manage to say.
I reach the car door. My lips still burn from his mouth, and my hands are not entirely steady as I get in and pull the door shut.
Do not look at him. Do not fucking look at him.
I start the engine, my hands shaking as I shift into drive and pull out of the parking lot.
In the side mirror, Zane stands near the doorway of the workshop with the amber light spilling out behind him. He doesn’t move. He simply watches me leave, and the sight of him standing there alone in that light does something vicious to my chest.
He grows smaller in the mirror as I drive, and still he doesn’t move.
The first tear falls before I reach the corner.
I wipe it away hard and fast, furious at myself and it, but another follows before I finish wiping the first. Then another, until my vision blurs and I blink fast to clear them. I am not crashing my car over a man, especially this man.
My fingers lift to my mouth.
I run them slowly over my lips.
Big mistake. The kiss is still there. His mouth on mine. His hand at my jaw, warm and certain. The low sound he made when I leaned into him. The way he pulled back before he took too much.
I have loved him through everything. That is the ugliest truth of all. The one I have been stepping around for years, and it lands in the front seat of my car on a Friday night, with shaking hands, blurred eyes, and nowhere left to put it.
I buried him beneath Damien’s clean sheets, polished surfaces, and a life that never fit properly, no matter how many ways I tried to arrange myself within it.
I loved Zane when he was a cocky seventeen-year-old with dirty hands and a grin that made trouble feel not just inevitable but worth it. I loved him when he stepped in front of those boys who would have taken more than I was willing to give and made it clear they were going to. I loved him when he broke me.
Even when I was certain the hate would finally win, I never stopped loving him. Not once, not for a single fucking second.
The realization does not come softly. It slams into me so hard that my foot eases off the gas without my permission.
The car slows and a horn blares from somewhere behind me.
“Fuck off,” I whisper, giving him the finger as he races around me.
I pull to the side of the road and wrap both hands tight around the wheel and force myself to breathe.
I will never love anyone the way I love him. Not some future man with clean hands and good shoes.
The thought should terrify me.
