That night, when his name lit up her screen, she felt her heart flinch before her mind could brace. She answered anyway. Habit! Hope! Hurt! All braided together. His face appeared on the call, but the man looking back at her wasn't the steady, self-assured force she had grown used to. His gaze was hollowed. His voice, low.
And she... she looked nothing like the girl he'd first met, the one who laughed too easily and healed too slowly. She didn't even look like the woman who had survived storms.
That evening she looked like a soul caught between breaking and disappearing. And it crushed him.
"I wanted to text you," he began, voice shaking. "But I didn't. I was busy but I could keep you updated. I thought I was protecting you. You were getting attached to me… and I can't give you anything back. I never thought my selfishness would hurt you this much. I'm sorry."
She listened in silence, but her eyes searched him like she was reading a confession written in trembling ink.
She saw sincerity. She saw heartbreak. But the wound in her chest was still open, still raw.
"You made me feel like a fool for confessing. A confession that you wanted to hear desperately," she said, voice steady but soft. "But I was the one punished for feeling. You have no idea how much that hurt."
His breath hitched. "I'm sorry. Truly sorry. I won't pull back again. But… won't that hurt you?"
"No," she whispered. "I don't want a marriage. I'm not made for family drama. I don't want commitments you can't give. But I can't… I can't be with anyone else. I won't be able to share a bed with another man. Can you see me with someone else?"
Her question shattered him from the inside out. He didn't speak for a moment. When the words came, they were fragile.
"I don't have any right to say that."
"You don't?" Her eyes narrowed.
"Don't you?"
He swallowed. "Do I?"
"Yes," she said softly. "Because I'm giving you that right."
His chest tightened painfully. "That would make me toxic and selfish."
She chuckled, and her face that was for the past few days sparked again.
"You forgot, dear. If the one being toxic is you… I'll love it. Your possessiveness, your darkness, your obsession; those are all I could ever want from you."
He stared at her as though she had resurrected something in him he thought he'd buried. Her spark. Her playfulness. Her fire. The weight he carried all day loosened, just a little.
A part of him wanted to. A part of him screamed that that's how it should be.
His soul whispered "that's our girl. You chose someone else. But I chose her. That makes her ours too."
"I won't be able to," he murmured, almost to himself.
"I don't deserve that kind of power over you. I'm not that selfish."
"But… I'll try", it came out subconsciously even before he could process like he was possessed.
She smiled then; a quiet, steady smile that felt like sunrise after a night too long.
Something shifted between them in that instant. Something irreversible.
Because in the tremble of her voice and the softness of her laughter, he realized it. Fully and painfully.
He loved her. Not a little. Not lightly. But deeply, dangerously, silently. And yet his first love, his partner, his life-none of that faded either. He lived in two worlds. And both had claims on him.
But he also knew the bitter truth carved into the bones of his loyalty:
If he ever had to choose, he would choose the woman he'd built his life with.
And that truth tore him apart.
Because he could fall in love with her; he already had. But he could never say it aloud. Never give her the full truth. Never let himself fall so deep that the boundaries dissolved.
So he held his confession behind his teeth, bleeding quietly.
She held her heart steady, trembling quietly.
And together, they stepped into a love that could never bloom in daylight… yet grew wildly in the dark.
But somewhere between one heartbeat and the next, his thoughts spiraled inward, into the quiet, merciless place where truth doesn't flinch.
"What kind of man am I?"
He watched her tired eyes, her fragile expression, and the self-loathing rose sharp in his throat.
"I had hurt the very heart that beat for me without conditions, without demands, without the slightest expectation of a promised future. She had asked for nothing I couldn't give; not marriage, not a crown, not a name beside me in the light. She was willing to be a secret if that was the only way to love me. And what had I done with that rare, impossible devotion?"
"I had broken it."
"I starved her of the only happiness she ever took from me: my presence, my time, a corner in my heart where she felt seen."
He couldn't give her what she deserved. He couldn't give her a forever, a place in daylight, a claim that the world could witness. And yet he still hadn't been able to let her go. He couldn't cut the cord binding him to her, even when he tried.
In his attempt to protect her, he had only wounded her deeper. He had even denied her the one simple sweetness she asked for-him.
The thought hollowed him. "I wasn't protecting her. I was protecting myself."
And the realization tasted like ashes.
He looked at her again; this girl who had offered him her truth wrapped in vulnerability, this woman who stood in shadows unafraid just for a chance to love him and he felt the sting of shame settle in his bones.
He had never meant to punish her. But he had.
Quietly. Cruelly. Unintentionally.
And somehow, she still sat there, offering him her honesty, offering him the right to her heart, offering him herself without hesitation.
He hated himself for the pain he'd caused.
He hated how easily he had fractured her.
And he hated that even with all this clarity, he still couldn't walk away.
Because loving her wasn't a choice anymore.
It was a gravity. And he was falling, even if the ground could never be hers.