Page 205 of Breathe Like Hell

“I know. And I know you’re trying. I⁠—”

“I love you,” she said, cutting me off. My chest clenched tight. “And I think you’re going to hate me for saying that,” she cried.

“No,” I murmured, shaking my head. “No.”

“Yes! You never let me want you, Micah. I need to know you, but every time I try, you push me away.”

I just stared down at her, down at this perfectly broken girl with stars in her eyes and my heart in her fist, whether or not she knew it.

“I love you,” she repeated, more desperately this time, like she was waiting to see if I’d shut down or say it back. Her eyes darted rapidly back and forth between mine. She was breathing hard, her pulse thrumming fast at the base of her exposed throat.

“Nothing will make me stop,” she continued, the words spilling from her lips. “Even when you’re mean to me and you punish me and hurt me and never let me in, I can’t stop falling deeper in love with you. I know that’s pathetic, but I’m pathetic for you, okay?” A choked little sob burst out of her and the sound ached deep in my chest.

My brave girl.

When I first met her, she didn’t want to let anyone take care of her—if anyone ever cared to try. She was stubborn and fighting her battles all by herself. And then she’d let me help her. Even though I fucked that up.

“You’re not pathetic. And I love you. I love you, Dakota. I love you more than my own life,” I whispered. “You have to know that. Do you know that?”

Her lower lip pushed out in a frown, tears spilling down the sides of her face.

“How can I trust you?”

“Because this is where I fell to Earth. In this forest. One of these trees was the first thing I touched outside of Heaven. This is what I used to regret.”

The question was there, in her eyes. Why? But she didn’t speak it.

“And the only reason I wouldn’t regret it now is because of you.” She looked up at me, protected by the cage of my body over hers. Freezing raindrops had begun falling from the sky in the gaps between trees, but they didn’t reach us here. Not yet. “Because I love you, and loving you gives me a purpose to be here.”

“Do I get to love you, too?”

I pressed my lips together, swallowing hard. It was so easy for me to love her. I couldn’t stop myself. But with her love came her expectations—expectations I’d fail to meet eventually.

“I’m sorry this is so hard,” I said, in the absence of a direct answer. I knew she hated it. “I hate that it’s not easy for us. I wanted it to be easy, but it’s not. It’s messy and painful but I think that’s the only way I can be.”

She was quiet for a moment, more silent tears trickling down her temples.

“I know why you don’t want me to love you, okay?” she said, making my throat tighten. “I know parts of you, Micah. I know that my care is the same as a blade to your brain, but you have to understand that hurts me too.”

The double edged blade. The way I loved her, through carving both of us.

I was fighting a losing battle, slipping farther into the depression that’d followed me ever since I left Mason.

He was my purpose. I loved him so fucking much. More than I could put words to.

It was why I hadn’t hesitated to give up my entire life to follow him here, why it’d never been a question in my mind. Of course I would fall with him, because whatever misery waited on Earth couldn’t be worse than how I’d feel without him in Heaven.

But it hadn’t mattered in the end, because I ended up without him anyway.

I’d been fucking stupid. Naive. Love-blind.

Crash-landing in this forest, my brain consumed with nothing other than the fear that he’d slipped away from me, that I’d somehow lost him in our descent.

And then I saw him in the water, saw his face, saw him choking on the air as it entered his lungs, and nothing else mattered. I would survive. My life had meaning, and it was Mason Ashborn. Whatever else happened was secondary.

Until the worst thing possible happened.

Until he did slip away from me for real, for good.