CHAPTER 5
827 Words
WHAT HE DIDN’T ASK FOR.
Skylar didn’t go far.
He never did when things hurt—distance had always been a negotiation, not an escape. He stopped two corridors down, where the air narrowed and the floor softened beneath his feet. A place between rooms. Between intentions.
He stood there longer than necessary, cane resting lightly against his leg, fingers curled around its handle without pressure.
He told himself to breathe.
It didn’t help.
Her voice replayed in his head—not as sound, but as impact. A vibration he’d felt through the floor, through the room, through himself.
It had been hers.
There had been no mistaking it. Not the shape of it. Not the hesitancy. Not the courage it had taken to let it exist at all.
And she had given it to someone else.
He pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, grounding himself in the familiar. Counting. Always counting.
One breath in, One breath out.He hadn’t meant to listen.
He hadn’t even meant to enter.
He’d felt her absence before he’d noticed it consciously—like a chair pulled away without warning. The kind of emptiness that rearranged space. He’d followed it instinctively, trusting the way rooms spoke to him when people didn’t.
And then—
Her voice.
Saying his name.
No.
Saying the Jonathan’s . Why did he think she’ll say his name, that nagging voice at the back of his mind kept reminding him of how he’ll never measured up.
He closed his eyes—not because it changed anything, but because it was habit. Because closing them had always been his way of saying enough.
He leaned his shoulder against the wall, careful not to let it look like collapse.
I didn’t ask for this, he thought.
I didn’t expect this.
That was the lie.
Of course he had.
Some part of him—quiet, watchful, endlessly measuring—had always known that the loud-mouth would reach places he couldn’t. That he would take risks where he hesitated. That he would invite her to do things without preparing the ground first.
And she had gone with him.
Not because she was careless.
But because she was brave.
That was what hurt most.
He had been patient. Intentional. He had learned her language piece by careful piece, shaping his hands around meaning until they obeyed. He had adjusted his instincts, swallowed his anticipations, let her correct him when care tipped into assumption.
He had listened.
But listening, he realized now, was not the same as asking.
He had never asked her to use her voice.
Not because he didn’t want to hear it—but because some part of him had been afraid of what it would mean if she chose not to use it with him.
Better to let silence stay sacred than risk learning it wasn’t.
But Jonathan hadn’t been afraid, he made it seem so easy to do.
He laughed under his breath, a sound without humor.
Of course he hadn’t been afraid.
He straightened slowly, pushing away from the wall. His body felt heavier now, as if the space inside him had shifted and not settled back properly.
He retraced his steps deliberately. Not toward her. Away.
He knew the building well enough by now—how corridors widened near windows, how the floor changed texture near stairwells. He let those small certainties guide him while his thoughts refused to be guided anywhere at all.
She didn’t owe me her voice.
He knew that.
He repeated it like a rule. Like a truth he could anchor himself to.
Still, the ache remained.
Not jealousy. Not anger.
Rejection’s quieter cousin.
He reached his room and closed the door behind him, resting his forehead briefly against the wood. Just a moment. Just enough to feel the grain beneath his skin, the solid reassurance of something that didn’t shift when he leaned on it.
He thought of the way her hands moved when she signed—precise, expressive, alive. The way her face softened when she felt understood. The way she’d corrected him without cruelty, trusted him with her boundaries.
And now—
She had trusted someone else with something she had never trusted anyone with before.
That wasn’t betrayal.
But it felt like being told, gently and irrevocably, this part of me is not yours.
He sat on the edge of his bed and let the quiet settle around him, familiar and sharp-edged all at once.
If he loved her—and he did, he realized, with a clarity that startled him—then he had to let her choose how she spoke.
Even if that choice wasn’t him.
That was what care was supposed to be, wasn’t it?
Letting go without bitterness.
Still—
His chest tightened.
And for the first time since he’d learned how to listen to the world without seeing it, he wished—briefly, selfishly—that he could have been louder.
- Writer
