06 What He Said
776 Words
She went home. Fell onto the bed. Buried her face in the pillow.
Everything from last night played like a film that didn't belong to her—the knife, the blood, his body moving in that silent, lightning-fast way she still couldn't understand. She'd knelt at his feet, cleaned the blood off his arm, smoothed the band-aid down with her thumb while he told her he'd had worse. And then he'd pushed her away. Farther than ever before.
"Why bother." She said it into the pillow. "If he doesn't want to take another step—why keep holding on."
She pulled the covers over her head. But her body still remembered. Every touch. The weight of his forehead against her shoulder blade. The way the entire world had gone silent when he'd cupped the back of her neck.
She hated herself for remembering.
But that wasn't what kept looping in her head. It was what he'd said after.
*I'd sooner put a bullet in my own head.*
She'd watched his face when he said it. The color had drained from him. Not the controlled pallor of a man calculating risks. Something else. Something that looked, for one impossible second, like fear.
She'd seen him kill a man. She hadn't seen him afraid.
Until now.
He wasn't afraid of the men who were hunting him. He wasn't afraid of the knife at her throat. She saw it now—he was afraid of himself. Of what he might become to her. Of the possibility that one day, even trying to protect her, he would be the thing that hurt her. She'd seen it in his eyes when he said those words. The certainty that he was dangerous not only to his enemies.
*I'd sooner put a bullet in my own head.*
She kept coming back to that sentence. Not because she believed he meant it literally—not yet, not this early. But because of what it revealed about how he saw himself. A man who thought he was poison. A man who believed the only way to keep someone safe was to keep them away from him. She'd met people who pushed others away because they didn't care. He pushed because he cared too much, and didn't trust himself to care the right way.
The thought should have scared her. It didn't. That scared her more.
She pressed her palms against her eyes. A different memory surfaced—unbidden, unwelcome. Tom. Not the Tom from the end, the one who'd handed her gift bags instead of his hand. The Tom from years ago. The one who'd picked her up from the airport at two in the morning, her flight delayed three times, and hadn't complained once.
He'd taken her bag, asked if she was hungry, and driven her home through empty streets while an old song played low on the radio. She'd fallen asleep in the passenger seat. When she woke, the car was parked outside her apartment, engine off. He was still there, sitting beside her in the dark.
She'd asked why he hadn't woken her.
"You looked like you needed the rest."
She'd believed him. She'd believed that version of Tom—the one who noticed when she was tired, who didn't rush her, who sat in the dark so she could sleep a little longer. She'd told herself that was who he was. And maybe it was. For a while.
That Tom had disappeared somewhere along the way. She didn't know when. She only knew she hadn't noticed until he was already gone. The man who'd sat in the dark so she could sleep had become the man who handed her gift bags instead of his hand.
She turned onto her side, staring at the sliver of light under her bedroom door. Vincent hadn't sent a message. She hadn't expected one.
She pulled out her phone. Opened his message thread. She scrolled up. His messages were short. No wasted letters. No emojis. Even his texts looked like him. She closed the thread without typing anything. If he wanted to reach her, he would. She wasn't going to chase a man who'd already decided she was better off without him.
But she couldn't stop asking herself the question that had been gnawing at the edges of her exhaustion since she'd left his apartment: *What kind of man looks at himself and sees a weapon?*
She didn't have an answer. She only knew she'd never asked it about anyone else.
Outside, the city hummed. She didn't sleep.
Three days later. Her phone lit up on the nightstand. A name she hadn't seen in weeks.
Tom.
- Writer
