𝐓𝐈𝐋𝐋 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐓𝐇 𝐃𝐎 𝐔𝐒 𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐓 - 𝟏𝟖+

T W E N T Y - S E V E N

Las Vegas, USA

K E I R A

I woke up with a start, unsure if everything that had happened was reality or something that was a fragment of my broken mind's imagination.

An arm tightened around my shoulder, and Nikolai's groggy voice had all the hair at the back of my neck standing, "I haven't bailed,"

My arm tightened around his torso almost instinctively as I turned my head to look at him, but he wasn't looking at me, choosing to stare at the dark ceiling instead.

"Why'd you stay?"

At that he looked at me, his eyes narrowed, "I'm many things, Keira, a liar isn't one of them."

Somehow his irreproachable words managed to pour salt on a wound that refused to heal and instead had festered with an infection.

"Fuck," he cursed under his breath, "I didn't mean it that way... I," He pinched the bridge of his nose, taking a deep breath, his chest moving underneath my head.

"It's okay," I found the words leaving me before I had any chance to stop them, and it wasn't like I'd wanted him to struggle looking for the right things to say when nothing in the world would make our situation easy to understand, let alone articulate it into words.

"I just want to know where we stand now that you're here?"

I held my breath, not even trying to guess what he might say because when I'd tried to be resilient in the face of his—very understandable—anger, he'd sharpened his words like knives and used them against me repeatedly, lacerating me with his indifference and hatred towards my existence. Now that I'd understood I could never piece back the life I'd torn apart with my own hands, he'd shown up, almost willing to help me put the pieces together, wrinkled and still tearing at the seams.

"What even is this, Nikolai?" I whispered against his naked chest, my lips almost touching his flesh as if they couldn't get enough of him. "Do you not hate me anymore?" I looked at him from under my eyelashes.

"This..." He exhaled, "I need you to understand that I haven't been living for the past eight years, and when you came back, it was almost like I'd been thrown out of that grave, and it made me angry." His fingers caressed my arm almost absent-mindedly, and I held my breath, waiting for him to continue.

"You did that. You breathed life back inside me when I'd been trying everything to sniff it out, so I did hate you for that."

I didn't miss his use of past tense for that, and my stomach filled with butterflies and my blood buzzed with a different kind of awareness as I became hyperaware of his carefully chosen words.

"I—I...," his voice broke, and I knew this was taking a toll on him, confessing to something that maybe he'd been hiding even from himself, "I can't be without you. The last few years," he shuddered underneath me, and tears stung my eyes as I wondered how could we put each other through so much, and yet still come back to each other, the moment our eyes landed on the other person like magnets.

"You have no idea how I've stayed alive despite trying my best to die. I can not be the man you knew from before, and I'm not sure I can tell you the three words you're dying to hear, but," he turned his face to me, his eyes alight with a flame that licked at my skin, and beckoned every cell inside my body to him. I ran my fingers over his jaw—which now had a light beard—and encouraged him to continue. Because if this was one of the first times he'd let me see his wounded, battered soul since I'd seen him again, I would be damned if I didn't kiss his wounds.

Maybe that was what we needed, to tend to each other's wounds, because alone, neither of us had healed, and the blood we'd thought had turned into scars had just started flowing all over again.