God, the look in his eyes.
It's everything I've spent years trying to forget.
Recognition. Devastation. Longing so acute it's practically a physical force radiating across the sixty feet between us.
Like he's seeing a ghost.
Like I've returned from the dead.
Like the universe just played the cruelest trick imaginable by putting us in the same room again.
The silence stretches and becomes something alive and terrible.
People are starting to notice. I can feel their attention shifting—the collective awareness that something is wrong, that the eulogy has stopped, that the man at the front has completely lost his composure.
But I can't look away.
Can't break the connection even though every self-preservation instinct I have is screaming at me to run.
Because he's looking at me like I'm the reason gravity exists.
Like seeing me has rearranged every atom in his body into a completely new configuration. Or maybe that’s just me feeling that.
Either way, I'm looking at him the same way.
Because all these years hasn't changed a damn thing.
And this is what I was most afraid of.
How is it even possible to feel this much from a single look?
How can five years dissolve in seconds like they never existed?
How does one person—one man I haven't spoken to in years—still have the power to rewrite my entire nervous system just by existing in the same room?
It doesn't make sense.
None of this makes sense.
I shouldn't feel this. Shouldn't be standing here with my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest, with my hands shaking, with every carefully constructed boundary I've built crumbling to nothing.
I tried to forget him.
God, I tried so hard to forget everything I ever felt for him.
Convinced myself it was just first love. Just intensity. Just the kind of all-consuming feeling you have when you're young and don't know any better.
I built a whole life in LA. Wrote books about other people's love stories while pretending mine didn't still live under my skin like a scar that never quite healed.
And one look.
One fucking look across a funeral chapel and it's all gone.
Every wall. Every defense. Every lie I've told myself about being over this, being over him.
The guilt hits me like a physical blow.
I have no right to feel this.
