Page 126 of Hamartia
He sounds fucking genuine when he says it too. Like he’s seriously talking about me being the one who has any kind of choice to make. When I’d already chosen. I’d chosen him.
It hits me like a fucking truck. He’s already chosen too. Thisishim choosing. And he’s not choosing me.
Just like Finn didn’t choose me.
I stare at him a long time before it gets too painful to look at him. I want him so much it’s like a solid thing in my chest, my throat, choking me. I stand, my legs weak from the impact of that truck he just hit me with. My bag is by the door next to my boots and I go pull them on. Coat next. Bag shucked over my shoulder.
“I told you I would have taken whatever you wanted to give me. Whatever that looked like.”
It takes all of my control not to shout it at him, to rein in the hurt and pain burning a path through my insides, familial and familiar. I’ve no right to blame him. He warned me over and over and over again about all the reasons this couldn’t work. He never said he loved me either. Never said he was ready to do this with me. He never really promised me anything. Still, I would have taken the scraps. Pathetic as that is. Likely Finn’s fault again because he’d left a hole so big it made me that desperate for Jae’s love now. A desperation that really I shouldn’t be afflicted with because my mom had always loved me enough.
He turns in his chair to look at me, a smile so beautiful and sad on his face it almost brings tears to my eyes. “Love cannot bloom hidden away in the shadows, Raphael. Eventually it will wither and die. It would not be fair to offer you a love like that, one that is half in the dark and dying from the start. You deserve something better than what I can give you.”
“And what about what you deserve? You deserve to be fucking loved too. And I would do that, I would love you enough for fucking both of us, okay? Just…let me…”Keep doing it.I can’t force the rest of the words past the thickness in my throat.
“This is the life I chose, Raphael, the love I chose. I am happy—you do not have to worry about me.”
The love he chose. Thelifehe chose. Neither of which involve me.
From the corner of the living room Shiro is watching us with sharp blue eyes, watching it all with impassivity. I envy him. Envy this fucking cat. Envy the love Jae has for him, envy the life he gets to live here, envy that Jae gets to be the center of his fucking universe so completely, so easily.
I scrub a hand over my face and nod as Jae stands and comes toward me. We look at each other for a few moments before he says, without a trace of fucking irony, “I hope that everything goes well for you in the New Year, and that you are healthy and happy.”
I open my mouth, close it again, then nod again. “Yeah. You too.”
He hesitates a moment, hands fidgeting by his sides, before he moves forward and wraps his arms around me tightly. I practically sag into him, one arm wrapping around his waist and one cradling his head as I bury my face in his hair. I nose down behind his ear, kissing him in the space where he smells so fucking good.
It’s him who turns his head to kiss me, slow and careful at first before it catches fire. Our tongues and lips falling quickly into those desperate, urgent pulls on the other until we can’t breathe, until we’re both half hard and rutting against each other like fucking dogs in heat.
Of course it’s him who finds the strength to end it, pulling back like he’s been burned even though his eyes are dark with arousal. I’m breathing hard and licking the taste of him from my mouth when my phone alerts me that my Uber is downstairs.
There’s not a set of words in my vocabulary that would fit inside this moment, so I don’t even attempt it. I give him another nod and heft my bag back onto my shoulder and say all I’m capable of saying which is:
“Goodbye, Jae.”
He smiles again. So beautifully sad again. “Goodbye, Raphael.”
I don’t look back once. I let his apartment door close behind me and walk to the elevator, pathetically hoping to hear his footsteps running after me or the sound of his voice shouting my name. I don’t.
It’s the loudest silence I’ve ever heard.
I stare at my phone all the way to the airport. Gripping it tight in my fist as I check in and go through security, as I huddle myself into a corner to wait by Gate 32 with my hood pulled low over my eyes. There’s a text from Cam to say that she won’t be back in LA until the day after tomorrow and I reply that I’m at the airport, before going back to simply staring at the screen. I think about what I’d do if he called me now and asked me to come back. If he asked me to choose him over the child growing inside Camille and I almost throw up from the realization.
I guess I am a lot like Finn after all.
The second the door closes behind him, I go back to bed. I text Mae Li to say that something has come up and I cannot make it to Tokyo for New Year’s and that we can catch up when she is back in Seoul. Then I turn off my phone.
I try not let my mind return to the thoughts I’d had while sitting in the scalding, then tepid, then cold bath. Of whatmighthave been. Of what I could have had. Had I been braver or a different person or chosen another life.
I had not lied to Raphael; this was the life I chose. I wanted it. I worked eighteen hours a day for eight years to have exactly this and it is greed and ingratitude that sits low in my stomach now. Heavy as stone. I cannot have both. I cannot have both my dream and him. Not now and not here. No one can have everything. Least of all me.
This is better. This way I can let him go without guilt. Now he gets to go back to his life before me, to a woman who can love him loudly and boldly and without shame or fear. Now he will have a child who will love him unconditionally. My heart warms at that. At the kind of father Raphael will be. A love as beautiful and strong and immovable as the sun. As fierce and certain as the moon. A love he had offered me.
I’d love you enough for both of us.
I curl onto my side and clutch at my stomach as the sobs grow louder and more intense, the words I’d been swallowing down for days making it hard to breathe.
I told you I would have taken whatever you wanted to give me. Whatever that looked like. I love you.