CHAPTER 38
I wrapped my legs around my chest and rested my chin on them.
"My mom used to disappear for days."
Tony's eyes cut to me. He didn't interrupt.
"Sometimes it was work. Sometimes it was men. I didn't know the difference until I was twelve. After that, I stopped asking."
He leaned forward a little, elbows on knees. Said nothing.
I went on.
"I started taking my dad's anxiety pills when I was fifteen. Half a pill at first. Then a whole one. Then a combination. Then whatever I could find."
The confession rested on my tongue. Bitter.
"There was this one night when I had too much. Wound up on the bathroom floor, barely breathing. My mom never even saw it until morning."
Tony's jaw tightened. His knuckles bunched into his jeans.
"She called my father. He was in Beirut covering a protest. He flew back the next day."
I looked at my fingers. Picked at the tip of my nail.
"He swore I'd never scare him like that again. Told me I had too much of the world to see, too many things to say. Promised me the camera could save me, if I'd let it."
Tony's tone was harsh. "But it didn't."
I shook my head. "It did attempt it. And then he died six months later. Heart failure. Stress, maybe. The kind you don't put in the obit."
My throat tightened. "And then I didn't trust the camera anymore. Because what's the point in freezing the world if it's still going to break?"
\-----
We sat there. Just sat.
The air between us crackled with something weighty and holy.
Then I said it. The thing I'd been carrying since the day we'd bumped into each other.
"I wasn't trying to ruin you."
Tony's eyes lifted. Met mine.
"I just wanted to freeze something real," I gasped. "That moment. That violence. It was the only thing that felt honest for months."
I hadn't expected him to forgive me.
I hadn't even expected him to respond.
But he did.
"You did ruin me," he said softly.
I gulped. Turned away.
He wasn't done.
"But I don't think I want to be who I was before."
\---
The silence afterward wasn't awkward.
It was holy.
He didn't extend towards me. I didn't edge nearer. We just sat. Back to back at length. Two broken children who'd ceased to pretend to be more.
\-----
I shut my eyes and listened to his breathing. Slow. Unhurried.
For the first time, we weren't fighting for dominance.
We were merely sharing air.
\-----
I fell asleep some time around breaths.
And for the first time in a long, long time… I slept without dreaming of the past.
"You're spiraling, Mac."
I stopped dead center campus quad, the wind tugging at the hem of my hoodie as if it was trying to yank me back to reality.
Arizen stood a few feet from me, her arms crossed, her face carved in stone. She had that look—the one that indicated she wasn't simply pointing out the obvious. She was warning me.
I didn't say anything to her.
Mainly because I didn't have anything to say.
"I'm serious," she said, walking towards me. "You're falling. And not in the poetic, sad-song kind of way. This is a crash. You just haven't hit yet."
"I'm fine," I said, turning back to the path.
"You're not. You haven't been."
I walked. She followed.
\---
It was cold outside, late October wind slicing through my sleeves. But I didn't feel it.
I only felt him—Tony—in every shadow, every step, every beat of my own heart.
His voice still clung to the inside of my head. His confessions. His silence. His restraint.
The problem wasn't that I hated him.
It was that I didn't.
And that was so much worse.
\---
Earlier that day, I'd tried to focus. I'd locked myself in the photo lab for hours. I'd said to myself I was there to work. To print. To be a student.
But every negative that passed through my hands was tinged with him.
A frozen smirk. A figure on the rooftop. That photo I'd snapped when he didn't know I was watching—his shoulders hunched in shadow, head bowed like a penitent in mid-prayer.
Tony, Tony, Tony.
He was in the grain of every picture. In the dust on the lens.
He was inside of me, and I had no idea how to rinse him out.
\---
"I get it," Arizen said, voice softer now as we walked. "He's charming. He's… broken in that dark, poetic way you consume."
"Don't psychoanalyze me."
"I'm not. I'm watching out for you."
"I didn't invite you to do that."
"No, you didn't. But you also didn't say anything when he started pulling you into his orbit."
We stopped again. Her hand fell on my arm. Light, but insistent.
"Mac," she said, "you're not in love. You're in survival mode."
My eyes burned.
"Maybe," I said, "survival just happens to feel like him."
Her face fell.
Not with disappointment.
But with heartbreak.
For me.
\---
We didn't speak the rest of the walk. She broke off toward the journalism building. I headed to my dorm.
But I couldn't get the words replaying in my head to stop.
You're not in love. You're in survival mode.
And what if survival feels like him?
\---
I did something that night I hadn't done in weeks.
I reached for my journal.
It was stuck between the pages of an old photo album, the one with my dad's handwriting in the margins. I'd written every night. About light. About people. About things I couldn't say out loud.
But since him, the words had stopped.
Now they flowed like blood.
Violent. Rushed. Necessary.
\---
October 29th
I don't know when I stopped hating him.
I don't even know if I ever did at all.
I wanted to.
That first day—God, I wanted to.
I wanted to scream. To cut him open with every ounce of guilt I carried.
But something changed.
Perhaps it was the way he looked at me when he didn't think I was looking.
Perhaps it was the silence in his breath after I told him about the pills.
Maybe it was that I saw something I knew—something furious and orphaned and starving to be seen.
He scares me.
Not because he might harm me.
But because I don't want him to leave.
I don't want to be more safe with him than without him.
And I don't want to admit that if he asked—really asked—I'd stay.
In spite of everything.