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The urge to lie braises the tip of my tongue, my defenses slamming down into place the second she accuses me of a revenge plot. “It had nothing to do with her.”

“She acted like you were in love,” Elena hisses, twisting her body to throw the accusation in my face. Like boiling hot water, it washes over me, agonizing welts cropping up along my body, making me jerk in surprise. “God, no wonder she tried to keep me away from you. She already knew what you were like, how all of this would end. I could’ve saved myself a lot of trouble if I’d just listened.”

“You and I are nothing like your mother and me.” I take her chin between two fingers, keeping her in place while I lean in and force her to look at me. “What I feel for you isn’t even in the same fucking universe.”

Trying to pull away, she huffs when I refuse to let go. “Then why couldn’t you tell me?”

Pinching my eyes closed, I let my head fall forward, shame flowing like a river through me. It empties in my blood, making me feel more like a goddamn monster than any crime I’ve committed ever has.

Off to the side, we hear footsteps as the house lights dim even more, and a voice asks the people in the box next to us if they need any refreshments before the show.

“Ice?” a familiar voice asks, the immediate recoil of my soul at the sound making me regret not just putting a bullet in her at the house.

I hope her face is purple and swollen. A nice little homage to the way I arrived at that hospital all those years ago.

I’m a little surprised they still showed up, and so soon after me. Perhaps they’d been hoping to corner me, and instead found themselves escorted to their seat.

Elena jerks her chin from my grip, and I let her go, blood rushing between my ears as my body tries to block out the sudden onslaught of noise. The director trots on stage, asking everyone to be polite and courteous.

A sniffle here. The unmistakable crinkling of a chip bag being dug into. Another sniffle. Someone’s baby crying slightly farther away, all completely audible through the musical score.

Tensing up, I lean back in my seat, attempting to focus on anything but the noise around me.

The auditorium darkens until our box is almost pitch black, the stage erupting in flashes of color as the lights crew introduces the first scene. I don’t know shit about ballet, so for the first few minutes of the show, I sit watching the dancers as they flit about in time with the music.

But somehow, even as the orchestra crescendos, I still hear the little noises from before. They worm their way into my brain, little parasites looking for bits of sanity to feast on.

I hear the ticking of my old Rolex watch and that fucking pendulum statue. The slurping sounds Rafael made the day I went to his office and convinced him to give me Elena.

Like floodwaters after a hurricane, every single sound that’s ever seemed to trigger me comes rushing to the forefront, ghosts haunting me after a brief blip of peace.

My eyes shift to Elena, who’s watching me instead of the show; I can just barely make out the soft slope of her nose, the shine in her golden eyes, the outline of those plump, pink lips. Slowly lifting my hand, I press my palm into her cheek, and suddenly, the noise stops.

Everything just... settles.

My response to the stimuli doesn’t, but as the absence of misplaced noise washes over me, eventually the racing of my heart and the tightness in my chest lessen, too.

“Are you okay?” she leans in to whisper, splitting my heart right down the middle.

“That’s my line,” I return, smoothing my thumb over her cheekbone.

She scoffs. “It looked like you checked out there for a second. Sorry for caring.”

When she moves to pull away, I shake my head, framing her face with both hands. “Don’t apologize for that.”

Her eyes turn glassy, tears shining in the spotlight reflecting downstairs. Dropping her gaze, she sighs. “I can’t do this right now.”

Gripping my wrists in her hands, she pries me off her, shoving my hands back so they’re in my lap. The rejection stings, like stepping on a bee in your bare feet, the sensation spreading through my nervous system. We sit quietly for the next several acts, our stony silence worse than any other possible sound I’ve heard.

An intermission finally takes place, the lights in the auditorium brightening just so the patrons can see their hands in front of their faces.

After jostling in my seat for several minutes, trying to get the anxiety coursing through my veins to dissipate, I exhale, pushing up on my armrests, and get to my feet. Elena turns her head, looking at me, and laughs to herself, although the expression looks completely devoid of humor.

“When you’re ready to come talk, you come find me.”

I start to turn around, moving toward the stairs, and she hisses, “Stop trying to make it look like I did something wrong here, Kal. You lied, you fucked up. Not the other way around. If I don’t want to talk about it, then I sure as fuck don’t have to.”

My mouth opens to refute her words, but I clamp it shut as I realize...

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