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“Wrong?”
“I’m not heartless. I know I’m not, because…” he licks his lips, “because, how do I love you if not with my entire heart?”
Tears prickle at my eyes because this is not how this was meant to go. I shake my head. “Xi…I don’t think we should keep seeing each other. Not for now.”
His grip on me tightens.
“I know what I did was wrong, Alex. I know…I know I lied. But you knew, and you chose to stay.”
“It’s not about the kidnapping. I’m in love with you despite that.”
“Nothing is the same in my life without you in it. I can’t go back to something that isn’t me anymore. My heart doesn’t belong to NSC. It belongs to you.”
Running a hand through his hair, he looks away and back at me, grabbing my hand again, holding both in his gigantic palms. He puts one against his chest and takes a deep breath. “Do you feel that? I feel like I’ve had to fake being alive for so long I had forgotten that I was barely surviving. With you, I’m finally learning how to breathe. You’re my oxygen, Alex. You’re my everything.”
“You’re my everything, too,” I rasp.
“Then there should be no issue. I took a job with Dickie. I’m painting. I want to change my life around. For you. For us.”
“I’m happy you figured it out,” I say honestly. “But I need to do the same.”
He doesn’t even let me breathe to keep going. “Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. Tell me how long you need.”
“I can’t give you a timeline—”
“How long,” he grates through clenched teeth. “I need to know when you’ll come back to me.”
“I can’t say. I’m barely learning to be myself. I want to be someone outside of my dad’s puppet. I want to discover myself. I want to know I didn’t do all of this because you had taken over my entire being, that I also did it for myself.”
He inhales through flared nostrils, attempting to control himself. “I need you,” he exhales. “Make me a better man, baby.Please.” The desperation in his eyes almost causes me to break.
“Make yourself a better man, Xi. And I’ll become a woman with a mind of her own while you do that.”
“What if…what if you don’t come back.” His throat is tight; I can see it. I can hear it in his fragile voice.
“Then it wasn’t meant to be, I guess.” I swallow the same tautness in my throat. I can feel our hearts beating in unison. I can feel the thread that links my beating organ to his.
My hand is still on his chest as the grip on my wrist tenses. “If I could go back to that night. The night I took you from your home…If—” his voice breaks. “If I’d known I could lose you, I would have kept you to myself. I would have never let you go.”
A genuine smile spreads onto my face. “That’s not true.” I press my hand harder against his chest. “It beats too hard for me, that big heart of yours.”
Going on my toes, my lips brush his before I leave a featherlight kiss on them. I step back, but he still holds me.
“Give me a Taylor Swift song,” he says with a hint of humor. “Just to make it all better.”
I need to leave before he shatters my resolve.
“Afterglow.”
He lets me go, and I whisper the most famous three magic words before walking back to the car.
Once inside, I break.
Tears come crashing and falling while my heart shrinks and pumps poisonous regret into my veins.
I sacrificed the love of my life for a chance to become whole. If this backfires, there will be nothing left of me.
“Sweetie,” my mom consoles me as I burst into tears. She holds me as the car drives away. I turn around only to see Xi run out of the cemetery and after our car until he understands there’s nothing he can do. The anguish on his face ends me, and a sob explodes out of my throat. I watch Xi become a small point on the road until we turn onto another street.
