Page 236 of Sage Haven

Soft. Unhurried.

His presence loomed in front of me before his fingers reached for my chin. Warm, rough from years of scars and callouses, yet gentle as they tilted my head upward.

And when my eyes met his, something inside me cracked.

His gaze was everything I remembered. Everything I needed. A storm of intensity, tempered by something softer, something that only ever existed for me.

“Don’t tell me,” Reich murmured, voice dropping to something just above a whisper, as if sharing a secret only meant for the two of us, “that after all these years, you still don’t believe me.”

He said it like he was smiling, but it wasn’t smugness or arrogance. It was a quiet knowing. A steady confidence that had carried him through so many impossible things. A certainty I used to be able to breathe in like air.

My lips parted to answer, but the words tangled behind the tightness in my throat.

And then he smiled.

God, that smile.

Soft, barely there. Just the faintest curve of his mouth, but it shattered me all the same.

It was the kind of smile that saidI’ve got you. The kind of smile that could pull me back from the edge of anything.

His thumb brushed along my cheek, tracing the skin like he was memorizing it. A slow, reverent drag of calloused skin over softness, leaving a trail of warmth I didn’t know I was desperate for.

I leaned into it, closing my eyes for the smallest moment. Letting myself fall into the simple act of being touched. Not because I needed to be comforted, but because I needed to be reminded that he was real. That this was real.

That there was still something left of us to hold onto.

When I opened my eyes, he was still there. Close. Steady. Like he’d never let me go.

“I do believe you,” I said, my voice shaking but honest. “But sometimes… sometimes I believe in you more than I believe in myself.”

His brow furrowed, and he shook his head, his hand slipping to the back of my neck, pulling me closer until our foreheads touched. The warmth of him, the steady rhythm of his breath, the weight of his fingers tangled in my hair—it was almost enough to quiet the storm inside me.

“You don’t have to believe in yourself all the time,” he murmured. “That’s what I’m here for.”

***

And then I woke up.

Always. Just before he kissed me.

As if even in my dreams, I wasn’t allowed to have him. As if the universe, cruel and calculating, was determined to deny me even the smallest taste of what it might be like to be his—to really be his.

I woke up reaching for him. Always reaching.Always empty-handed.

It was like some vicious game my subconscious played, teasing me with fragments of a life that could never belong to me.

A life where his lips met mine, where his hands didn't hesitate. A life where he stayed.

But I was never allowed to live in those moments. Only on the edge of them.

Always so close, and then gone.

And every time I woke up, I was hollow again. Grasping for something that slipped through my fingers like sand and all it left behind was the sharp ache of longing.

Since he left, I searched for him everywhere.

In the shifting blur of crowded streets. In the quiet hush of shadowed alleyways. In every low voice that might carry his name, his laugh, his warmth.