Chapter 364: Expectations

NOAH

The first heavy rush of the pain began to level out, leaving behind a dull, throbbing weight. The next thought arrived automatically, the only logical conclusion to a mess like this.

You should walk away. Pack your things and leave and never look back again.

But the moment the thought formed, I knew I wasn’t going to do it. I couldn’t.

Not today, not tomorrow, not anytime soon.

Because this wasn’t just some crush. It wasn’t just me being attracted to a handsome guy with money and bad habits.

It was love. It was the heavy, stubborn kind of love that keeps you glued to a plastic chair in an intensive care unit for four weeks straight, working yourself until your eyes are bloodshot and your head spins.

It was the kind of love that makes you collapse onto a stranger’s shoulder outside your own apartment building because you are too tired to stand up and too scared to go inside alone.

I had spent a month praying for an unconscious man to open his eyes, whether he could hear me or not.

I saw it clearly now, looking at my own reflection in the dark screen of the television.

I couldn’t just turn it off.

Love doesn’t have a switch on the wall that you can flip when things get too expensive or too dangerous.

I wished it did. God, I wished I could just click my fingers and stop feeling the warmth of his skin whenever he came near me, but it doesn’t work that way.

I wanted to be brave. I wanted to have the kind of pride that makes a person pack their bag, throw the keys on the counter, and walk out the front door before they can get hurt any worse.

Or, if I couldn’t have that, I wanted Cassian to just hurry up and end it.

I wanted him to throw me out before the roots got any deeper into the dirt than they already were.

But as I sat there, wiping my face with the back of my hand, I knew I wasn’t getting either of those things.

I was going to stay. I was going to sit right here on the edge of his bed because leaving required a kind of strength I didn’t possess yet.

The love didn’t die.

That was the most miserable part of it. It stayed completely whole, sitting in my chest like a heavy brick, inconvenient and stubborn as ever.

What died was the picture I had been drawing in my head when I thought he wasn’t looking.

It was a stupid, secret little future I’d been building in the quiet corners of my mind... some version of a morning where we didn’t have to look over our shoulders, some version of staying together where the days actually belonged to us. A life with a shape that lasted.

That picture was gone now. Cassian’s voice had cut it right out of me with two short sentences.

The room grew very quiet around me. It was the dull, heavy silence that settles in after hope leaves through the window, but the sadness stays behind to take up the extra space.

I made my decisions then. There was no big speech, no drama, no announcement. The choices just settled to the bottom of my mind like mud sinking to the floor of a river.

First, I would stop wondering about his past.

Julian. Whoever that man was, whatever he had meant to Cassian, it didn’t matter anymore.

If what I had with Cassian was just a temporary stop on the tracks, then it didn’t matter who had been on the train before me. It was never going to be about me anyway.

I would stop looking past the end of the week. No more imagining next year, or next summer, or even next month.

There was no future. There was no after. There was only whatever we were doing right now, for as long as he wanted to keep doing it.

And I wouldn’t ask him for more than he was willing to give. I wouldn’t beg for his heart, and I wouldn’t try to stretch his words into something they weren’t.

My eyes stopped leaking. The wetness on my cheeks dried up, leaving my skin feeling tight and itchy.

A massive, crushing exhaustion took over my body.

The door handle clicked, and the bedroom door swung open.

Cassian walked in, his dark hair a little messy. He took off his shirt, tossing it onto the chair by the wall, and looked over at the television screen where some actor was crying over a hospital bed.

"What are you watching?" he asked, his voice low and casual.

"Some drama," I said. My voice came out even, steady, and completely normal.

I pulled my lips back into a smile. It had the right shape. My cheeks bunched up the way they were supposed to, and my teeth showed just enough. If you were looking at me from across the room, you’d think I was perfectly fine.

Cassian stood there, studying my face for a beat too long. His dark eyes narrowed slightly, searching my expression. "You okay?"

He asked it with that quiet, genuine concern he only used when we were completely alone. It was the same tone that had always broken me, the one that made me want to pour out every secret I had ever kept.

"I’m fine," I said, holding the fake smile steady until my jaw ached. "Just tired."

He let out a short breath and walked over, climbing into the bed beside me. The familiar, heavy weight of his body shifted the mattress, pulling me slightly toward him.

He reached out, his large hand sliding around my waist, pulling me back against his chest. The teasing came right on schedule, comfortable and predictable.

"Tired," he repeated, his breath warm against the side of my neck. "After two days of doing absolutely nothing but watching me work out and eating all my snacks?"

I forced a laugh out of my throat. It sounded right. It hit the ears exactly the way a real laugh should. "It’s exhausting work, Cassian. Supervising takes a lot out of a guy."

He shifted, his hand moving from my waist up to my jaw. His fingers were warm against my skin, curling around my chin to turn my face toward him.

I let him do it. I didn’t pull away, and I didn’t stiffen up, because pulling away wasn’t part of the deal I’d just made with myself.

When his mouth met mine, the kiss was exactly what it always was. It was warm, familiar, and tasted like the coffee he’d been drinking downstairs.

I kissed him back. My lips moved against his because they knew the rhythm by heart. My arms came up to touch his shoulders because my body didn’t know how to do anything else when he was this close.

But something inside me didn’t show up for it. It wasn’t that I hated him, and it wasn’t that I was trying to punish him by being cold. It was just a distance.

It felt like I had taken three very careful steps backward inside my own head, moving away from the ledge where I used to throw myself into him without looking down first. I was holding onto my own hand now.

Cassian noticed immediately. He was too sharp, too used to reading people for signs of trouble to miss a change that close to his own face.

It wasn’t like I was rejecting him, and he could tell the difference, but he could feel that something was missing from the way I usually met his mouth.

He pulled back just an inch, his eyes dropping to my lips and then rising back up to look into my eyes. A tiny crease formed between his brows, his mind working through the data, trying to figure out what had shifted in the air between us.

He didn’t ask me about it. Not yet. He just kept quiet, putting it in the dark where he kept all his other secrets, quiet and without a word.

Then he leaned back in and kissed me a second time, softer this time, his lips moving slower, as if he were trying to track down the thing that had just moved out of his reach.

I stayed still, and I let him look for it, knowing he was never going to find it again.