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How deep does his obsession with me go?

How can I find out?

Or should I cut my losses and run?

“I want to go home,” I say quietly. The admission surprises me, but the moment I say it, I know it’s true.

Kincaid looks like I slapped him yet again. His face falls, his brow crinkling in something like sympathy, something like pity. “Where is home, Syd?”

And of course he’s got me there. I have no home. No school, no job, no money, no prospects, no home.

You have nothing, a voice whispers in my ear.You are nothing. Nothing but alone.

That’s when it strikes me, a poisoned lance that spears deep in my heart, one I’ve tried so hard to shield myself against.

I am so alone in this world.

So completely unmoored, untethered, and alone.

I cover my face with my hands and burst into tears.

There’s a pause, perhaps another look of shock from Kincaid, but then he’s up and beside me, wrapping his arms around me and holding me against him. I press my palms against his chest, a feeble attempt to push him away, but his arms are strong and they keep me in place. He holds me, tight, so tight, until I relent and place my cheek against him. The tears stream down and he puts his palm at the back of my head.

“You’re going to be okay,” he murmurs. “Trust me, you’re going to be okay.”

How?I think.How?

“I have no one,” I sob against him. “I truly have nobody. Not a single soul in this world loves me. Do you know how awful that feels?”

“I do,” he says, kissing the top of my head. That makes me melt into him further, undoes another thread that was so tightly wrapped around me, that was holding me together. “I wish I didn’t.”

“I just thought I could still get through life without it mattering,” I say, my chin trembling so hard that my words are staccato. “I thought I was okay with being alone, just me, stuck in my head with only myself for company. I’ve always been so different, but I took pride in it, and when others complained of loneliness, I thought that was something that happened to other people and not to me. But I was wrong. I was so fucking wrong.”

He doesn’t say anything to that, just continues to hold me, his palm cradling the back of my head.

And yet I can’t stop the words from flowing any more than I can stop the tears. “I had my grandmother, she loved me more than anything. She loved me enough to make up for the loss of my mother. She loved me enough to fill that void when my father was gone, at sea for days and weeks at a time. And then I lost her. I lost her to that horrible disease, one that ripped me from her memory until I was nothing to her, a nobody.”

I take in a shaking breath. “And then I thought that maybe I should become closer to my father, that this was a sign to try to get to know him better, even though he worked all the time. So I made the effort, and so did he. Our time was so brief. It was too brief. I finally felt like I saw the man in the shadows of my life, and then he was taken from me. We didn’t have enough time together. We never have enough time!”

“I know,” he says. “We don’t.”

“Now what? Now the only people who loved me unconditionally are gone and I have no one else. There’s just me. I only have myself, and I don’t even feel like I know myself anymore. I don’t evenlikeher.”

Silence fills the room. I can hear his heart beating against my ear, quick but steady. I inhale his scent, that sweet tobacco and cedar mixed with the warm santal from the candles.

“You’ll find someone, one day,” he eventually says.

“You don’t know that,” I snap, the anger at it all.

“But I do. Because I know you are someone worth loving. That you are worthy of being loved. And there is someone out there who will one day lay down their life for yours.”

If he wasn’t holding on to me, I think I’d be on the floor.

Can it be you?I think, settling deeper into his arms.Can your obsession turn to love without either of us going up in flames?

“You just need faith,” he goes on, voice soft. “You just need patience. You just need to keep surviving for now. It won’t always be this way, I promise.”

“But I don’t see the way out,” I whisper. “I don’t see how I’ll ever stop being too much for someone. Too impulsive, too brash, too reckless, too self-centered, too cold, too sensitive,too much. Too me.”