I’m scared of how fast I fell for you even when I had every reason not to. How it feels more like compulsion than choice, this plunging toward you.
Sometimes I try to flatten it, sit on the feeling and squash it small enough to fit in my mouth so I can swallow it down and pretend it's nothing special.
It doesn’t work.
If I talk about you, it sounds like a mild case of infatuation.
If I think about you, it’s a fever. It’s the kind of love that could take everything. And I'd let it. I’d hand you every piece of me that bleeds if you asked.
Even if you didn’t.
Maybe I already have.
15
SOPHIA
There’s a lollipop on his pillow.
I stare at it for a long time without moving. Still on my back. Still warm from sleep. The morning light coming through the curtains in that particular Paris way.
I know.
The lollipop tells me everything before I’ve even reached for it. But knowing and accepting are two different countries, and right now I can’t make myself cross the border. So I just lie there. Looking at it. The cellophane catching the light. The heart shape. Whole, not cracked.
He found me a new one.
I close my eyes. See his face. Feel his hands. Kiss his mouth. If I keep my eyes closed, he’s still here. If I don’t get up, the morning stays suspended. He’s not gone yet if I don’t go look. The apartment hasn’t confirmed it. The kitchen hasn’t confirmed it.
Ian hasn’t confirmed it.
Staying here exactly as I am, there’s still a version of this morning where I walk down the hall and he’s standing at the counter with flour on his knuckles and that almost-smile and I panicked over nothing.
I know that’s not what I’ll find.
But I lie there anyway.
Ten minutes. Maybe twenty. Listening to the silence inside these walls. The silence of him sleeping. The silence of him standing at the window watching me.
The silence of him being… gone.
I expected it to be a violent breaking of bones and cartilage—something loud and catastrophic, the kind of grief that announces itself with pain and destruction. But it’s not that. It’s quieter.
The wrongness of it spreads slowly. Turning like something being wound in the wrong direction, degree by degree, and each degree survivable on its own, and all of them together something else entirely.
I should get up.
I don’t get up.
I just lie here with that fact sitting on my chest, not crushing—not yet—just present. Heavy in the way things are when they’ve been dreaded long enough to gather weight before they even arrive.
I knew this was coming. I’ve known since the rooftop. Since the first morning I woke up beside him and understood that every day was borrowed. I told myself I was prepared for it. I mademyself ready in the way you make yourself ready for something you know is going to hurt—by imagining it over and over until you think you’ve worn the edges off it.
But those worn-off edges? They’ve grown teeth, and today is the day they start tearing me apart.
Ian appears in the doorway. He’s holding a bottle of tequila loosely at his side and looking at me the way I’ve never seen him look at anything. Like I’m something breakable he’s been asked to carry and he’s terrified of dropping.
Neither of us says anything. I just lie here, and he just stands there—two people caught halfway between impact and aftermath.
