Page 65 of What We Burn

The ache in my hand reminds me how close I came to joining in, how I almost let myself give in to the anger, the urge to make someone pay for what almost happened to her. But instead, I told him he wasn’t worth it.

That was over a week ago now. The cut on his face is healing. The others are starting to talk to and include him like he never tried to leave.

I tolerate him.

The kettle clicks off.

I fill my mug with steaming water, dunk the tea bag, and take a seat at the other end of the island. For a while neither of us says anything. My mind fizzes with all the things I want to say to him—real, savage things, not the gentle parsing I did for Sage. All the versions of how-could-you, why-did-you, it-was-supposed-to-be-us at war in my throat. But they don’t sound right, not even in my head. Maybe because what I want is so complicated I couldn’t diagram it if my life depended on it.

Eli breaks first. “You smell like her.”

I don’t blink. “Suck my dick and I’ll taste like her too.”

The words come out before I can stop them—crude, defensive, designed to wound.

The look in his eyes goes dark, pupils inking out the lighter flecks around the center, and I realize he’s actually thinking about it. The muscles in his jaw twitch like he’s working through the logistics of getting my mouth on his, or my mouth somewhere else, and for a second I’m not sure if he’s about to stand up and punch me or just climb over the countertop and ruin us both with his teeth.

It makes me mad. It also makes me hard, which makes me more mad. I curl my fingers around the mug and look at him across the space, the new truth hanging between us like a cut wire.

“That what you want?” he says, his voice empty of the scorn I expected, so gentle it almost tricks me into thinking I imagined the heat beneath it.

I laugh, but it comes out brittle and wrong. “No.” I set the mug down hard enough that tea sloshes over the rim. “Fuck off. You don’t get to do this.”

“Do what?”

“This.” I gesture between us. “The sad eyes. The two a.m. kitchen vigil. The thing where you sit in the dark looking wounded and wait for me to come fix it. I’m done, Eli. I’m done being the person who holds you together when you can’t be bothered to hold yourself.”

He doesn’t argue. Doesn’t defend. Just sits there with his hands around his untouched mug and takes it.

“I don’t want you to fix anything,” he says.

“Could’ve fooled me.”

He snorts. The sound is ugly and entirely without humor. “You really think that’s what I’m doing? Sitting here hoping you’ll pat me on the head or hold my fucking hand? Jesus, Micah.” He runs both hands through his hair and for a second looks so raw I almost reach for him, out of pure habit.

“Then what are you doing?”

He shrugs, but the movement is sharp. “Trying not to lose my shit while you’re upstairs fucking the only woman I’ve ever actually loved.”

And there it is. The thing I came down here to be furious about, and instead my body does the traitor thing it’s always done around him—heat pooling low, my pulse picking up, years of muscle memory waking the second he says something raw. I hate it. I hate that I’m hard. I hate that some part of me has been waiting for this since the night he walked out.

I let out a hollow laugh. “Don’t bullshit yourself. You made it pretty clear she was just a side gig for you.”

His face goes cold. “That’s not true.”

“No?” I force a smile, though it feels like my mouth is breaking in half. “Because from where I’m standing, you set the whole thing on fire and then just left. You didn’t even look back.”

“You think I wanted to?”

“No, Eli. I think you never wanted any of this. You just wanted to know what it felt like to ruin something perfect.”

He looks at me like he wants to disagree, like there’s something in his throat he wants to cough up, but the words don’t make it out.

I watch his hands clench around the mug like he might shatter it. He’s shaking, just a little. I want so badly to keep being the person who cares, but right now all I want is to see him break in half the way he broke me.

Done.

I slide off the stool and head for the stairs, but before I clear the island Eli reaches out and catches my wrist. For a second, all my muscles tense, ready to pull away. But his hold isn’t hard—just enough to stop me, to make me turn and look at him again.