Page 63 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
His eyes are open now, wide, dark, and far more awake than they should be. His fingers tighten just enough to stop me completely.
“You aren’t ready for that,” he says quietly.
There’s no arrogance in it. No teasing. Just certainty.
For a second, I can only stare at him. Then my eyes drop, not to the waistband this time, but to his back in my memory. To Medusa. To the scarred skin carrying her.
“Your back,” I whisper.
His expression shifts almost instantly. Something closes again behind his eyes.
“We all have demons, Octavia,” he says, loosening his grip until he lets my wrist go entirely. “If I had any sense, I’d keep you far away from mine.”
Pulling my knees up onto the mattress, I sit there beside him, arms wrapping around them as I try to steady the riot inside my chest. The room is too warm and too cold at once. My body stillaches with heat from his mouth, with confusion, with the kind of wanting that makes me angry at myself for how quickly it took hold.
“And are you going to?” I ask after a moment. “Keep me away.”
He lowers his arm from his face, looking at me properly. The alcohol is still in him, softening the edges of his control, but it hasn’t erased the sharpness. If anything, it’s made him too honest.
“Tonight?” he asks, the word coming out almost bitter. “No. Tonight I don’t think I could, even if I wanted to.”
He pushes himself up a little, enough to sit with his back against the headboard, his body swaying faintly before he catches himself. Wet hair falls into his eyes again. He doesn’t bother pushing it away.
“Tonight,” he says more slowly, “I’m not Silas. And you’re not you. We’re just two drunk people trying to outrun what we are until morning makes us look at it.”
I let out a quiet, humorless breath.
“Outrun it,” I repeat, because that lands closer to the truth than erase ever could.
He doesn’t answer. He just watches me. Something about the way he does it makes staying feel like the worst possible decision.
So naturally, I start to leave.
I only get halfway off the bed before his hand catches in my shirt.
The grip folds the damp fabric in his fist. When I look down, the expression on his face is enough to stop me colder than the touch.
“Stay,” he says.
It’s the first time all night that word has sounded more vulnerable than demanding.
A refusal rises automatically, terrified of where this night has already taken us.
Then he speaks again, quieter, but somehow heavier.
“Let me be someone else for a few more hours.”
The sentence reaches deeper than I want it to.
Not because it’s dramatic. Because it isn’t. It sounds tired. Honest in that ugly way honesty becomes when someone is too worn out to dress it up. He isn’t asking for sex. He isn’t asking for forgiveness. He isn’t even really asking for comfort.
He’s asking for a pause.
For a version of himself that doesn’t have to carry the full weight of what he is when the sun comes up.
This is still a terrible idea.
It is, in fact, the kind of terrible idea people spend years regretting.
