Page 278 of Breathe Like Hell

There was a pause.

“Well, I don’t know what you want me to say to that,” I said dryly. Instantly, I could see the irritation in his body language.

“You don’t have to fucking say anything, Micah!” He raised his voice. “I was just telling you. I had⁠—”

“No. I didn’t do that shit hoping to come back and have this conversation with you about it!” I stood up from the chair, my heart slamming on my ribcage. Mason stood too, but neither of us took any steps closer. We faced each other, breathing harder, the frayed, knotted, tangled, breaking threads of our souls stretched messily between us.

“You did it because you wanted to die.”

I pressed my lips together. “Yeah, probably. Is that what you want to hear? That I still value your life above my own? That it wasn’t even a question for me?”

“Those are two different answers,” Mason said, taking one slow step towards me. I held my ground. “Either you wanted to die, or you wanted to save me and Dakota.”

“It can’t be both?”

“I need to know,” he pleaded hoarsely. “Did I do that to you? Make you hate your life that much?”

No.

It was the absence of you.

“We’re not doing this,” I rushed, finally breaking our eye contact to walk away from him, knowing he would follow me and dreading the sound of his footsteps. “All you need to know is that it happened. I wouldn’t have done it had her life not been ripped away from her like that, but I didn’t hesitate either. Does that satisfy you?”

“She wouldn’t want you to feel that way. She loves you.”

I spun around. “And I can’t handle it! I can’t handle anything! I cut you off after fifty two years without a conversation. Imagine what I could do to her.”

“The reason you didn’t have a conversation with me was because I—” His voice got tight, his sentence choked off in the middle.

“Not you. Me.”

“I should’ve known, Kill! I should’ve asked! You didn’t owe me control or words or convincing. I knew you.”

I stepped back until my hip hit the edge of the counter, but Mason didn’t stop his advance until he was barely a foot from me. His eyes were dark with desperation.

“Stop simplifying this into a conversation about consent, when it’s fucking not. I’m fucking fine. The only thing that night did was make me realize I couldn’t survive us if I couldn’t be honest with you—if nothing changed. And I knew nothing would change because of who I am! Admitting how powerless I’d become would’ve felt worse than anything you could’ve done to me.”

Mason was an unmovable stone.

I was an impenetrable wall.

Neither of us would be willing to relinquish blame to the other. As easily as we’d argued with words of external hatred, we’d shifted to arguing with words displaying our internal hatred. We used to fight for dominance, for control, for the right to blame the other for our brutal end.

Now, we fought to place that same weight on our own shoulders.

I had no idea where we were supposed to go from this point.

He was wrong.

I just stared at him.

Mason took another step forward, as close as he could be without touching me. I held myself motionless.

“You never told me,” he started, his voice low. “But you shouldn’t have had to. Anything you think you did wrong doesn’t cancel out anything I did wrong.”

Fear gripped my chest, panic weaving its way through my ribs the longer this conversation went on. We’d had it before. Mason understood what almost happened, understood how I’d lost control, understood how badly he’d drained me, but somehow accepting the fact that had almost been another memory like the one that’d altered my life in the first place was horrifying.

This was a consequence of my dishonesty. Nothing else.