Suddenly, my mind slips into a void—a place where the only sensory thing I can feel is numbness. The questions, the clarifications I was seeking, screech to a halt.
When I continue to remain silent, unable to respond to him, I feel his gaze darting between me and the traffic.
“Cece? Baby, are you okay?” His frantic voice punches through the low roar in my ears.
I nod, at least I think I do.
“We’re almost home, okay? Just one more minute. We’re almost there.”
I don’t think he’s lying for my benefit. Because when I force my eyes to blink through the sun in my eyes, I realize we’re exactly one minute away fromparking at his lot.
I don’t notice much else after that. I’m sure I walked on my own, maybe with some assistance, and we reached the penthouse within a few minutes after I last heard his voice.
Not to say that he wasn’t speaking. He probably was.
But the buzzing finally relents as I feel Levi’s shaking hands holding mine in a tight grip. A sharp sting cuts at my palm.
That’s when I feel a hard object in my hand. An ice cube. Surprisingly efficient.
A cold, wet hand cups my cheek, and I look up to see his eyes boring into mine, shining with potent relief. “There you are.”
The ice cube slips away, and Levi quickly puts it in the display tray on the coffee table next to us.
“Sorry, I…”
“It’s okay,” he says, exhaling unevenly before settling down next to me and cocooning me in his arms. “God, you fucking scared me for a minute there. What did I say? Did I say something wrong? Or was it—”
“I don’t know,” I tell him honestly, voice dull. “I think it was the clause being gone, maybe. I just… blanked out.”
He sighs. “I’m sorry. I was just—I realize that it’s not a source of comfort for you. And I was stupidly excited about… doesn’t matter.”
Doesn’t matter.
Levi’s words stick the same way the ice cube did at my skin a few seconds ago. That same thing that was supposed to divert the sting from my chest to my palms.
But these words don’t divert any pain. Instead, they lodge deeper where those endless questions were. Settling with the same unease—reminding me that they’ll remain unanswered if I don’t start voicing them.
Those questions weren’t about the clause. At least notjustthe clause. And they are evolving too rapidly in the absence of it.
Suddenly, there’s no clause to hide behind.
Every single doubt born out of it that I’ve carried through our relationship is going through a gradual erasure. The excuses I planted for myself so that I could blame the clause and not our flawed love.
Well, maybe not flawed. Nascent, perhaps.
But then I force myself to recall how he just removed the clause from our lives. How he gave up his entire career to prove the love he proclaims.
And without the foggy blanket of medication, I’ve also come to terms with the fact thatthis Cecewon’t be happy with variations of the truth.
Because before, when I got them, when I was blindsided by lies of omission—Levi had given them to me. The truths he deemed as enough. And I still felt empty-handed.
“I have a question,” I blurt out, and he leans back to lock his concerned eyes with mine. “I have…”
I pause when his thumb brushes between my brows, melting away the frown I didn’t even know I had. “I want to ask something that—maybe it won’t make sense immediately but…”
“You can ask me anything.”
I hesitate briefly before forging ahead. “You have a playlist on your phone,” I begin, and somehow my own frown transfers to him, his eyes growingconfused. “You always had it queued when we’d drive somewhere together. You… you fought your father and—”
