Firefly Nights

CHAPTER 13.75

I was crying for every moment he'd left me standing in the cold of his silence. For every almost-word, every almost-touch that never crossed the space between us. For the realization that maybe love wasn't enough if you had to beg for it to stay.

"I know you didn't do anything wrong."

The confession slipped out of me on a breath I barely controlled, thin and fragile, like spun glass that would shatter if I so much as touched it wrong. It wasn't loud. It wasn't bitter. It was worse than that—it was true.

The words curled bitter on my tongue even as I said them, because this was never about right or wrong. It wasn't about facts, about moments you could lay out cleanly in a courtroom and measure like fence posts. This was deeper.

This was about the way absence leaves bruises just as surely as betrayal.

I dug my nails into my palms until I felt the faint sting of skin breaking, anything to anchor myself when everything else was coming unstitched. My body was trembling under the effort of holding it together, every muscle tight and aching like I was carrying something too heavy for too long. I pressed my arms tighter around my ribs, as if I could keep myself from spilling out across the floor in pieces.

"But this..." I swallowed hard, forcing the rest of it up past the knot swelling in my throat. "This still feels wrong."

I didn't yell it. Didn't throw it like a weapon. I just said it the only way left to say it—bare, exhausted, the marrow of a truth neither of us had the courage to face before now.

Behind me, I could feel him.
His gaze bore into my back, searing through the brittle walls I had managed to build up over the course of this night. It was a gravity I knew too well. The way he pulled at me without ever lifting a hand. The way he could undo me without ever saying a word.

And God help me, I turned.

Because some part of me was still desperate enough to believe that if I looked back, maybe this time he'd be there. Really be there.

He was standing where I had left him, bruised and battered, his frame held taut with the kind of tension that didn't come from fists or broken ribs. His silence was a living thing, stretching between us, wrapping tight around my throat until breathing felt like a losing battle.

It wasn't his injuries that nearly brought me to my knees.
It was his eyes. Always his eyes.

The were broken now. The kind that didn't heal with bandages or time. The kind that carved itself into a man's bones and stayed there. And still, somehow, it wasn't enough.

Still, it wasn't what I needed.

My chest hitched, my ribs locking down like they couldn't hold in the ache anymore. Tears blurred the edges of him until he looked almost like a memory—something fading, something already half-lost.

I hated how naked I felt standing there. Hated how easily he could strip me down to the scared, hurting thing I'd spent years pretending I wasn't.

"It's not even about the girl," I said, and my voice didn't shake this time. It was steady. It was full. It carried every inch of the heartbreak lodged deep in my lungs. "It's the way you don't even care that it hurts."

The words thudded into the silence like stones dropped into a too-still lake, sending ripples through a night already pulled too tight around us.

Slowly, painfully, Colt moved.

He straightened, the motion stiff and deliberate, like every part of him was resisting it. His boots scraped against the worn wooden floor, each step slow enough that it felt like time itself was dragging. And when he finally stood in front of me, close enough that I could see the flecks of gold buried in the wreckage of his blue eyes, I almost wished I hadn't turned around at all.