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I must have cried myself to sleep at some point, or maybe into some halfway state where I’m only partially aware of my door pushing open, a thin stream of light rushing into the darkness before I’m bathed in shadow again.
It isn’t until the mattress dips down behind me and a familiar heat impacts my back that I fully wake up.
My heart is shattering as a set of strong arms wrap around me, my eyes burning with more tears as a large body presses against me. My breath leaks out on one slow, shuddering exhale as a warm cheek presses against mine, and I can feel the heat of Ezra’s breath.
Don’t ask me how I know it’s him. I just do. You always know when the person you belong to is in close proximity. Always know when the person who destroys you is holding you tight.
We’re both still and silent for several minutes, the tension from being together warring against the relief we feel for the exact same thing.
It’s like a rubber band that has been stretched for almost a decade, tight and burdensome, threatening to break and snap back at any second from the miles that existed between us. And now it’s relaxed, the threat of damage gone because the distance is absent.
Only what new damage are we facing by being like this?
I want to tell him to leave.
Ishouldtell him to leave.
But I can’t find the willpower to do it.
Instead, I state the obvious.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I whisper, my voice cracking as I fight back more tears.
“I know.”
Ezra’s voice is just as soft, but it’s so deep that it sinks inside me to weave through my veins, knotting up until I’m nothing but a tangled mess.
Everything he says, every look he gives me, every touch I’m lucky enough to feel is absorbed so deep that I’m practically drowning in this man when we’re together and empty when we’re apart.
Even now, my body is trembling, and so is his, both of us desperate to continue clinging on while knowing we’ll walk away again.
Because we have to walk away, only he does so angry and hurt and betrayed, while I do it to protect him.
It’s torture.
Pure, painful and never-ending.
It’s hell, with my heart being torn out and my soul ripped apart.
It’s why this can’t be happening, why I need to get out of this bed and stay as far away from Ezra as possible.
I wiggle in place to pull away from him, my butt tight against his hips when he reaches down to grip my waist and hold me still.
“Don’t move, Em. Just stay still a little longer.”
“We shouldn’t be doing this.”
“I know,” he growls, so much pain in that sound that I bleed to hear it. “Just do it anyway.”
“Why?”
“So I can breathe for once,” he whispers, his voice a jagged shard that slices me bone deep. “Please. Just let me breathe.”
I can’t say yes immediately, can’t feel the restraint and tension in his body and not remember what it felt like when they left, the nights I spent crying until I dried out, the sound of my phone ringing that I left unanswered.
Hekilledme when he wouldn’t give up, and hedestroyedme when he finally did.
Worse than the ringing was the silence that followed. And I spent the next nine years fighting to forget him.
