Chapter 137: One breath apart
The morning scent still clung to the villa—earth kissed by rain, scalding coffee, lingering sleep stuck to the fringes of the rooms. Therapy had only just ended an hour prior, but its weight was still pressing on my chest, still mute and reflective. I was a page turned, not yet prepared to be read. As if something fragile would still chip off the edge if I pushed it too hard.
Caspian was at the kitchen sink, sleeves rolled up, drying hair in sticky waves, humming some soundless something again as he splashed boiling water over the tea leaves. The mug he used was cracked at the handle—a tiny fault he would never replace. I watched him cradle it as if it mattered. He had not spoken since the session, but he didn't need to. Not now. I could feel the lines of his mind in the intention of the way he moved, slow and deliberate, as if laying down a memory he didn't want to lose.
I leaned against the archway, shoulder on the frame, my other hand playing with the hem of my sleeve. The floor beneath the soles of my bare feet was cold. Immovable.
"You always become quiet when something catches you," I murmured, my voice low.
He didn't stir. Only breathed softly, the steam rising off the kettle in pale ghosts. "And you draw."
"Touché."
He turned to me then, an eyebrow lifting, the smallest smile creeping up the corner of his mouth. "Did it. stick today?"
I nodded. "That line she said—that about how sometimes love after trauma isn't fireworks. It's oxygen. Something you don't even know is present until it's gone."
He stiffened. The kettle hissed softly.
"I can breathe around you now," I repeated. "That scared me before."
Caspian poured the tea, but his hand hovered on the lip of the cup as he spoke, "And now?"
"Now it just feels like I don't need to hold my breath anymore."
He turned totally around, the two mugs hurtling toward the table. We sat across from each other, knees almost touching beneath the weathered oak table. His eyes swept over my face in the way he did when he was unsure whether to push or leave it alone.
Rain kept pounding at the roof. Sky was a grey-blue pale color, not stormy—only reflective. It was a kind of day that felt made for half-spoken thoughts and gentle confessions.
"I find myself thinking," he said, "about how close I came to losing you. Not once. Not in the ways it felt like I did."
I didn't need to ask him what he meant. The silences. The nights spent sleeping with our backs turned in the same bed. The bruises that nobody saw. The weight we both carried but never unloaded.
"You didn't lose me," I said, my voice hardly above a whisper. "I just… got lost for a little while."
He leaned forward, opening his palm. I placed my hand in his blindly. Our fingers intertwined like a reflexive gesture. His skin was warm and familiar, a landscape of comfort.
"I wish I had held you even then," he said.
"You did. Your way."
His thumb stroked mine. The room was quiet, except for the steady rhythm of rain and the distant hum of the fridge. And yet the quiet between us was deafening in the best possible ways. It was charged with meaning, with all of the words we hadn't been able to say yet.
"What scares me now?" I asked.
He moved his head, ever so slightly.
That I'll forget how hard we worked for this. That I'll begin to take it for granted."
He concentrated, his eyes sharpening with intensity. "I won't let you."
"I won't let me either."
We sat there for a long time, fingers tangled together, eyes meeting eyes—our past and our future hanging in the balance of one quiet breath.
Then he stood and spun around the table. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, and he bent down gradually, his lips brushing mine. It wasn't a wild or passionate kiss—it was slow, deliberate, like a sentence unfolding word by word. Soft pressure. Warm breath. And silence shared that spoke volumes.
He didn't pull away. He just rested against my forehead.
"I want to build something with you," he whispered. "Not just heal. Not just recover. Build."
I closed my eyes. "Then let's build."
\---
Later that evening, we were on the couch together, a blanket snuggled around us, a movie quietly playing on the screen. We didn't watch it.
Caspian's hand encircled my ankle, abstracted, fingers tracing languid patterns. I pushed into the contours of his body, curled under his arm, my sketchbook resting in my lap. But I'd not made a mark.
"Tell me a memory," I exclaimed abruptly, voice low. "From before all of it. Something you haven't said yet."
He looked down, considering. "You mean from the years I spent trying to forget everything?
"Yes. But pick something you'd like to remember."
A pause.
"There was a bookshop that I used to walk past on the way to school," he said to me. "Small. Nobody ever in there. But there was this girl who owned it. She always had a cat sleeping on the counter. And every day, she'd wave at me as if we were the best of friends."
I smiled. "Did you ever go in?"
He nodded. "Once. Before I flunked out. I bought a book I didn't need just to speak to her."
"What did you say?"
He forced a weak smile. "That I hoped she never stopped waving."
"And did she?"
"I don't know. I never took that route again."
I grasped his hand. "Maybe someday we'll go back. Find it. Ask her if the cat is still there.".
Caspian moved forward. "Would you go with me?"
"Anywhere."
The room uncoiled around us. The fire spat. The rain kept falling, but now it was more of a beat than a tempest—one we'd grown accustomed to living within.
One breath from each other. No longer fearful to breathe.