Page 277 of Breathe Like Hell

The burn that’d swallowed me after I flicked the lighter against my own palm was little more than a memory now, the only trace of that pain imprinted in these dim shadows running along my skin. Mason had already been in the sky at that point, Dakota held tight to the front of him as she gasped for breath she could never find, her white wings limp and bloody hanging off her back.

When I thought about it, I was almost uncomfortable with the morbidity of carrying around a lighter in my pocket for the weeks after learning about Dakota’s true nature. Angelakia. It wasn’t something I looked forward to admitting to.

Of course, I’d mostly expected we would have to find a third-party angel to gift her transformation—or to force to do it—but the idea that it could’ve been myself had always lingered around the edges of my skull. And so, I carried a lighter with me. I was too much of a planner to ignore what would happen after I potentially gave Dakota my life—Mason would have to burn my body. I’d been hoping I might be able to find the strength to do it myself, to spare him the trauma, but it probably hadn’t mattered in the end.

He sat down on the couch, and I didn’t look at him directly, but I could see his feet at the edge of my vision.

I considered feeling for his emotions, but my strength wasn’t what it’d been before. The process of my entire body healing after death was tiring enough.

“If you don’t want to talk, we don’t have to. I’m not going to make a big deal of it,” Mason started. I kept my stare glued to my hands. “And I’ll leave if you want me to. Leave and never come back. But I really want to apologize to you.”

My pulse quickened, beating up in my tight throat, and I clenched my fingers into fists, then flexed them back out.

“I honestly don’t want an apology,” I said, keeping my voice as low and controlled as I could.

“Do you just want me to go?”

The anguish in his tone had me glancing up, my eyes finding his darker ones, heat crawling along my ribs. The expression on his face now was almost identical to the one when I’d left him, but with less surprise and more pain. Like he’d been expecting this, trying to brace for it, and failing. I thought about that expression a lot. It haunted me. He hadn’t deserved the way I left him.

“No.” I cleared my throat. His face didn’t relax at all. “You don’t need to apologize,” I clarified.

“But how could I⁠—”

“Because I let you believe I was fine.”

Silence filled the air, and I wasn’t ready to have this conversation—would never be ready—but I’d already died once. I wouldn’t kill myself again with more lies. I’d had about twenty three years to come to terms with my own decisions, two long decades of living with the knowledge that what caused our end was my dishonesty. As much as Mason’s instability tore me apart, my own inability to be truthful with him about it was the final nail in our coffin.

I’d put myself in the position to be hurt.

I’d let him think everything was better than it was.

I could only hide from that for so long.

“I should’ve known,” Mason finally said. “I knew you, Micah. I should’ve realized you’d⁠—”

“I don’t want you to do this,” I cut him off, shaking my head. “Just let it be. I didn’t want to let you down, didn’t want to be seen as weak, and so I never told you how much I was struggling. It’s not your job to read my mind.”

The words burned on the way out, and Mason didn’t look any happier to be hearing them than I was speaking them.

I wasn’t sure there was a point, anyway.

What purpose did my explanations serve now?

Mason deserved to know years ago why I left him without a glance back. I couldn’t do it then, and I could hardly do it now. And now that I’d told him about our last night together, using the most euphemistic words possible, he’d latched onto that act as the thing on which to shackle his shame. He saw my past and what’d almost happened between us through the same lens, but the core feeling from those events was different to me. It had to be different.

It wasn’t about what could’ve happened.

It was about what I’d realized about myself.

In that moment, I saw how far we’d truly gone, how lost I’d become to him, how lost he’d become to me, and neither of us were honest enough to handle something like that. He’d trusted me blindly, and I was no longer capable of deserving it.

“Did you burn yourself?” he questioned, pulling my gaze away from my hands again.

“I didn’t want you to have to do it.”

I watched his throat move when he swallowed, his eyes darting away for an instant.

“I wish you hadn’t made that choice for me. I would’ve…” His head fell forward, hands lifting to press against his face as he sucked in a deep inhale between his palms. “I would’ve liked to see your face one more time, before it was engulfed in flame.”