He had never asked.
The realization settled in him like a fracture, spreading.
Thorne leaned forward and opened the desk drawer.
His early attempts at poetry were where he'd left them. The handwritten pages in his precise script were the words of a man who could not access his own feelings without filing them in triplicate.
Your presence constitutes a disruption to my operational baseline.
He'd written that to be romantic. His truth-sense, even now, flagged it as sincere and terrible in equal measure.
He put the pages aside, took out a blank page, and picked up the pen.
Phoebe—
He stopped. Started again.
Phoebe, I need you to know that?—
Wrong. He crossed it out. His handwriting, normally meticulous, was uneven.
What I said at your door was?—
Worse. He crumpled the page. Took out another. The frost was thickening on the desk now, his control slipping with each failed attempt, and the temperature in the apartment had dropped low enough that the plants on the bookshelf were going to suffer if he didn't get himself together.
He tried a third time.
Phoebe. I told you to take the contract because I was afraid that if I asked you to stay, you would, and then one day you would realize what you gave up, and you would look at me the way she had looked at me ten years ago, and I would not survive it twice.
He stared at the sentence.
The lines weren’t beautiful, but they were true.
He kept writing. The pen moved. The words came out badly. They were halting. Too formal in some places, too raw in others. His handwriting deteriorated as the sentences got closer to truths he had never said to anyone. He wrote about all the things he loved about her, the ways she made him feel, and how he had walled it off because the last time he let himself hope, the hoping ended with the wordcoldand a decade of frozen rooms.
He wrote:Showing was never enough. I showed you everything for weeks, through tea and walks and frost and my body in yours, and you are still leaving. Showing is what I do instead of risking words. The words are the thing I have never been brave enough to offer anyone. I am offering them now. They are bad. I am aware they are bad. But my truth-sense confirms they are sincere, which is the only quality I can guarantee.I am not asking you to stay. I am asking you toknow that you were never the one leaving. I was the one who pushed you to go.
He put the pen down. The page was not finished. The poem or letter or whatever it was did not have an ending because he did not know the ending. The ending depended on her.
His hands were shaking. His pulse was irregular. His breath was wrong. The frost wanted to bloom across every surface within reach, and he let it.
He put on his coat. He folded the unfinished and imperfect page, and the ink smudged where his fingers pressed the creases. He put it in the interior pocket against his chest. The weight of it sat there like a second heartbeat.
He stepped outside.
The festival was going quiet. Evening mode when the stalls shuttered, the bioluminescent lights dimmed to their slow, amber glow along the market lane, and the vanilla snow from earlier settled in soft drifts against the cobblestones. The Eternal Pine pulsed against the dark sky, slow and gold, and the three moons were high, and the air was sharp and still, and the cold that rolled off Thorne's body as he walked was colder than the night around him.
He started toward her quarters.
The page in his pocket pressed against his chest. The ink was still damp from the speed of writing, and the cold was probably ruining it, the words blurring on the paper the way his voice would blur if he tried to read them aloud, and none of that mattered because getting the words to her mattered more than getting them right.
His comm went off.
The emergency ping. The one he'd told her to use if anything felt wrong. The sound of it split the night open like a fist through glass.
He opened the channel.
A man's voice. Warm. Calm.
