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Ambrose is staring at me now. No smugness. No challenge. Just that unreadable coolness that always makes me wonder what’s spinning behind his eyes.
“He came back six weeks later,” I say, sipping my beer. “Said he’d made a mistake. Said I was everything. That she didn’t mean anything.”
Ambrose scoffs. “Let me guess—he was drunk. Or lonely. Or had some kind of divine epiphany that only came with his dick in someone else.”
My lips twitch. “Something like that.”
He’s quiet for a beat, then, “What did you say?”
I glance over, meet his gaze head-on. “I told him to choke on his epiphany.”
Ambrose’s smile isn’t big, but it’s real. Brief. But it lingers in his eyes.
“Sounds like he deserved it,” he says.
“They always do.”
The silence after isn’t awkward. It’s companionable. A shared trench between two people who know what it feels like to be collateral damage in someone else’s war.
He tilts his bottle toward me slightly, a mock toast. “To bad decisions and worse exes.”
I clink mine against his. “And to surviving them.”
We drink.
And for the first time since I’ve known him, Ambrose looks less like a man trying to win, and more like someone trying to stay afloat.
He doesn’t say thank you. He won’t. But the way he lets the quiet sit between us instead of filling it with some veiled insult or slippery deflection?
That’s close enough.
“Is this the part where you tell me we’re supposed to be together and shit?”
His voice is dry, but I hear the sharp edge underneath. Like he’s bracing for it. Another prophecy wrapped in soft words. Another tether knotted too tight.
I snort, lifting the bottle to my lips. “No,” I say. “Honestly, it doesn’t have to happen. You don’t owe me anything.”
Ambrose glances at me. Cautious. Calculating. Like he’s waiting for the punchline I’m not delivering.
I meet his gaze head-on.
“Fate’s overrated,” I say. “So are rules. And expectations. We’ve all been pulled around like puppets—by the Hollow, by Branwen, by the bonds. I don’t need to add to that.”
He doesn’t speak, but the flicker in his eyes is telling. A crack in the cool veneer.
“I don’t want someone because the world says I’m supposed to,” I continue. “I want the ones who look at me and choose me anyway. Even when it’s complicated. Even when it hurts. Especially then.”
There’s a long pause. The kind that stretches into something heavier if you let it. But I won’t.
“So no,” I add, softer now. “I’m not here to convince you of anything. I just thought… maybe you needed a beer and someone who doesn’t want anything from you.”
Ambrose exhales slowly, gaze drifting away. He rolls the bottle between his palms. “You talk like someone who’s lost things.”
“I’ve lost everything,” I say quietly. “And still found more.”
He finally nods. Just once. A flick of movement, but something in him eases. The tightness in his shoulders, the strain behind his voice. It doesn’t disappear—but it settles.
We sit in silence a while longer, the kind that doesn’t feel empty, just still. There’s no spark of fate here. No looming bond. Just two people on the edge of something, choosing—for now—not to fall.