WRONG LOVE 2: CHOICES

Chapter Fourteen: The Quiet After

The house was too big without him.

That was the first thing she noticed.

Not immediately — immediately she noticed nothing because immediately she was standing in the forest in the rain calling his name into trees that had already swallowed him and getting nothing back. Immediately she was numb in the specific way that the body goes numb when something happens that the mind refuses to fully process because fully processing it would require accepting it and she was not accepting it.

Not yet.

Not standing in a forest in April with rain on her face and his name still in her throat.

She walked home.

She didn't remember walking home.

She was simply there — in the doorway of the house, wet through, standing on the threshold of the place they had built together in the months since January with his boxes and Mason's seventeen and the kitchen table and the pool and the slow cooker and all of it —

All of it still here.

Him not.

She stepped inside.

Closed the door.

Stood in the hallway for a very long time.

The bond told her everything she didn't want to know.

For the first few hours it was still there — thin and distant and aching, the warmth of him reduced to something she had to concentrate to feel, like trying to hear a voice at the very edge of hearing. She concentrated. She sat on the bed and pressed her hand flat to her sternum and concentrated with everything she had.

North-east.

Moving.

Getting further.

She sat with it all evening — feeling him recede degree by degree, the specific unbearable mathematics of distance doing what distance did to a bond that had never had to survive it before. She felt him the way you feel a warmth after its source has been taken away — the ghost of it, the memory of it, the shape it had pressed into you still present after the thing itself was gone.

By midnight he was barely there.

By the next morning—

Nothing.

She woke up and pressed her hand to her chest and felt —

Silence.

Not the comfortable silence of him sleeping, the deep even warmth of the bond at rest. Not the absence of communication.

Silence.

The specific cold silence of a connection that the distance had stretched past the point of feeling.

She lay very still.

Hand flat on her sternum.

Waiting.

Nothing.

She had felt him every single day for over a year. Had woken every morning to the warmth of him in her chest — north-east, present, the living confirmation that he was in the world and choosing to be in it with her. Had felt his moods and his pain and his amusement and his want and his love flooding the connection at all hours of every day until feeling him had become as automatic as breathing.

And now —

Nothing.

She pressed her hand harder.

As though pressure could reach what distance had taken.

Nothing.

She lay in the bed they had shared.

In the house they had built.

In the April morning that didn't know or care what had happened in a forest yesterday.

And she didn't get up.

She didn't get up the next day either.

Or the one after.

The days accumulated with the specific indifference of time that has no interest in whether you're participating in it. Morning became afternoon became evening became night became morning again and Elara moved through the sequence minimally — from bed to window sometimes, from window back to bed, occasionally to the kitchen where she stood in front of the open fridge and looked at the food Mason had stocked weeks ago and closed it again without taking anything.

She wasn't hungry.

She was considerably old and she had survived without feeding for longer than this and her body knew it and her body didn't care because hunger wasn't the problem.

The problem was the silence in her chest.

The problem was reaching for the bond twenty times a day with the automatic reflex of someone who had been doing it for over a year and finding nothing and then remembering why and having to do the work of accepting it again from scratch every single time.

The problem was that the bed smelled like him.

She knew that was temporary. Knew that smells faded and fabric held things only so long and that eventually — days, a week, two weeks — the sheets would stop carrying him and become just sheets.

She didn't change them.

She lay in them.

She pressed her face into the pillow that had been his.

She stayed.

His shirt was on the chair by the window.

Black. The one from the night of the pool — she'd taken it off him herself and dropped it there and neither of them had moved it in the months since because it had simply become part of the room's geography, another piece of the ordinary they'd built.

She picked it up on the second night.

She didn't think about it.

She was moving past the chair on the way from the window to the bed and her hand reached out without asking permission and closed around the fabric and she picked it up and that was that.

She brought it to bed with her.

Held it against her chest.

His smell was still in it — pine and warmth and the specific thing underneath both of those things that was just him, just Jace, the thing she had pressed her face against in corridors and kitchens and forests and had taken completely for granted because why would you catalogue a smell when the source of it is going to be there tomorrow—

She pressed her face into it.

She cried.

Not the quiet restrained kind. Not the kind she was used to — the controlled grief of someone who had learned over three centuries to process things privately and thoroughly and then seal them away.

The other kind.

The kind that didn't ask permission.

The kind that came from somewhere deeper than dignity.

She cried into his shirt in the bed they'd shared in the house they'd built and the bond in her chest said nothing and the rain that had started April off so strangely was still coming down outside and she cried until there was nothing left and then lay there with the shirt pressed against her heart and waited for morning.

She went back to school on the fifth day.

Not because she was ready.

Because staying in the house one more day felt like something she wouldn't survive — not physically, never that, she was three centuries old and had survived considerably worse — but in the quieter way. In the way that made staying feel like learning to live in a wound instead of healing it.

She got dressed.

She put the ring on.

She had not taken it off.

She had looked at it a dozen times in five days — this gold ring he had put on her finger in a flower field in winter with hands that were almost steady and eyes that had never been more certain — and each time she had thought about taking it off and each time she had not.

She put it on.

She went to school.

Blackwood Academy received her the way it always received things it didn't know what to do with — by continuing to be exactly what it was and leaving her to navigate that.

The corridors. The lockers. The noise of ordinary lives.

She moved through all of it on automatic pilot, doing the things her body had learned to do without her permission over months of doing them — the route from the gate to the locker, the locker to first period, first period to second.

People looked at her.

She felt the looking.

She didn't look back.

She sat in classes and stared at things that weren't the board and turned the gold ring on her finger with her thumb — slow, rhythmic, the way she'd been doing it since the forest, a habit she hadn't decided to develop but that her hands had developed for her.

He's not here, her hands said with every turn.

I know, she told them.

He's not coming back, they said.

She pressed her thumb against the ring harder.

I know, she said again.

Lunch was the worst.

She had known it would be the worst and she went anyway because the alternative was sitting in an empty classroom and that was somehow less survivable than this.

She went to the courtyard.

To the table.

Their table.

She sat in her usual seat and looked at his.

Empty.

Of course empty. She had known it would be empty. She had prepared for it to be empty. She had told herself the whole walk from fifth period that it would be empty and that she was going to sit across from an empty seat and eat something and that was going to be fine.

She put her tray down.

Sat down.

Looked at the empty seat across from her.

The ring caught the winter light.

She looked at her food.

Ate nothing.

Turned the ring.

Mason wasn't there either.

She had known that too — had been told, gently, by a text she'd received on day two. I think it's better if I'm not around for a while. It'll draw less attention to you. I'm sorry, Elara. I'm so sorry. And then, after a pause: He loves you. That hasn't changed. None of it has changed.

She had read it three times.

Had not responded.

Not because she was angry at Mason — she wasn't, or rather she was in the peripheral unfocused way of someone whose grief was too large to have specific targets and was distributing itself across everything in the vicinity. She just hadn't had words.

She still didn't have words.

She sat at the table alone.

Ate nothing.

Turned the ring.

Aaron found her on the third day back.

He appeared at the table at lunch and set his tray down across from her — across from the empty seat she'd been staring at, occupying the space that she'd left empty as though filling it with a person would make the emptiness behind the act more bearable — and sat down without asking.

She looked at him.

Storm grey eyes. Steady. Carrying something careful in them that wasn't quite sympathy because Aaron didn't do sympathy exactly — he did presence. He did the specific kind of showing up that didn't require you to talk or perform or be anywhere near okay.

"You don't have to sit here," she said.

"I know," he said.

"Aaron—"

"Eat something," he said. Nodding at her tray.

She looked at it.

"I'm not hungry."

"You haven't eaten in days," he said. "I can tell."

"I'm a vampire," she said. "I don't need to—"

"Elara."

She looked at him.

Those storm grey eyes on hers — not pushing, not demanding, not asking her to be anything other than exactly what she was right now which was broken and present and getting through one lunch period at a time.

"I don't want company," she said quietly.

"I know," he said.

He picked up his fork.

Started eating.

She looked at him.

At this wolf who had come here to kill her and had ended up fighting beside her and was now sitting across from an empty seat at a courtyard table eating his lunch in the specific determined way of someone who had decided to be here regardless of whether they were wanted.

She looked at her food.

She picked up her fork.

She ate three bites.

It was the most she'd managed in days.

Aaron didn't comment on it.

Didn't say anything at all.

Just sat there.

Present.

And somehow that was the most bearable thing anyone had done for her since a forest in April.

The nights were the hardest.

The days had structure — school and corridors and the automatic pilot of a body that knew its route even when the mind was elsewhere. The days had Aaron appearing at the table whether she wanted him there or not and the ring to turn and the empty seat to look at and all the small acts of surviving that filled the hours between waking and dark.

The nights had nothing.

The nights had the bed and the silence in her chest and the shirt.

Every night she picked it up from where she'd left it the night before — on his pillow, always on his pillow, because she had long since stopped pretending she was managing this with any kind of dignity — and she brought it to her and held it.

His smell was fading.

She knew it was fading. Could feel it happening — the slow diminishing of the thing she was trying to hold onto, the specific cruelty of time taking even this.

She held it tighter.

Like pressure could slow it.

She cried into it.

Not every night. Some nights she was too empty for crying — lay there with the shirt against her chest and the bond silent in her chest and the gold ring on her finger and the feeling of existing in a space that still had his shape pressed into everything and just —

Existed.

One hour at a time.

One night at a time.

She pressed her hand flat against the bond.

The silence pressed back.

Come back, she thought into it.

Come back.

Come back.

The silence said nothing.

She held his shirt.

She turned his ring.

She waited for a morning that would eventually come.

On the fourteenth night she lay in the dark with the shirt pressed to her face and thought — this is what he chose. He stood in a forest in the rain and he chose this. He looked at me and said I'm never coming back and he meant it the same way he'd meant everything, completely and without reservation, and he walked into the trees.

She turned the ring.

He loves you, Mason had said. That hasn't changed.

She pressed the shirt closer.

She believed that.

That was the thing that made it survivable and unbearable in equal measure.

She believed it completely.

He loved her.

He had left her.

Both things were true.

Both things were going to be true tomorrow and the day after and every day after that until something changed or didn't change or the world did whatever the world was building toward.

She closed her eyes.

Held the shirt.

Let the night pass over her.

Waited for morning.