Still You

"I want to hold on to you and not let go." His voice cracked on the last word. "That's what's wrong with me. You are what's wrong with me. You've been walking around being completely, catastrophically you and I have been losing my mind about it since the first week of first year and I can't -" He exhaled. "I can't do this anymore. I can't keep pretending I don't -"
"Stop." Her voice was very quiet now.
He stopped.
She wasn't looking at him.
Something about the way she was standing, the set of her shoulders, the specific stillness of her, made something cold settle in his chest.
"Mila."
"It doesn't matter," she said.
"What?"
She turned around.
Her eyes were dry. Her jaw was set. She looked like someone who had made a decision so painful that the only way to survive making it was to feel nothing at all while it was happening.
"I'm leaving," she said. "The job offer. I accepted it."
The cold in his chest spread.
"The one in -"
"Yes."
"When."
"Three days."
Three days.
He stood there with three days sitting in the space between them like a wall that had just appeared from nowhere, solid, immovable, built from everything she'd worked for since before he'd ever known her name.
"Mila -"
"This -" she gestured between them, at the wreckage of the last twenty minutes, at four years of everything. "None of this changes that. I worked for this. I've been working for this my whole life and I can't -" Her voice caught. Just once. She steadied it immediately. "I can't give that up. For a feeling I don't even have a name for yet."
He looked at her for a long moment.
Then he did something he had never done.
Not once. Not in years of being the most composed person in every room he'd ever walked into.
He dropped to his knees, holding onto the fabric of her dress.
Not dramatically. Not performed. Just, down. Like the weight of it finally exceeded what his legs could carry.
"Don't do this to me, Cariño."