Page 5 of Break Me Apart
I’ve always been good with absence. It’s a skill you learn early when attachment proves itself unreliable, when the safest way to survive is to make yourself smaller internally while remaining impeccable on the surface. It’s also a skill you get praised for by people who benefit from your silence.
It’s convenient, really.
When people leave, are reassigned, or disappear behind official phrasing and sealed reports, you adapt. You don’t reach for what’s no longer there. You adjust and carry on.
There have been other men, other women, other presences in general that occupied some space for a time and then didn’t. I handled those losses efficiently.
I convinced myself that the lack of impact meant maturity rather than avoidance, that the absence of pain meant I had done something right. I was praised for it, told I was disciplined, reliable, and not prone to distraction.
But none of those people were Caiden Varrik.
I wake up when I am supposed to, dress with habitual precision, train until my muscles burn, and work until thehours compress into something featureless and obedient. I do everything correctly, and I’m a model soldier.
If they gave medals for being dead inside, I’d have a whole row of them.
From the outside, nothing about me invites any concern. I’m functional, controlled, and completely unremarkable in exactly the ways this place rewards. I’m the sort of man commanders like to point at when they’re trying to convince themselves the system works.
Caiden is gone.
That’s a fact, and facts I can live with. What unsettles me is not panic or even longing in the most obvious sense, but the subtle misalignment of everything else.
The days feel slightly off, as if the balance has shifted and I keep compensating without quite knowing what for. I notice it in the evenings mostly, when I turn onto my side, when there’s no familiar body, no steady breathing, no quiet sense of someone else occupying the same space. No stupid, infuriatingly comforting noises, and no British muttering.
The silence isn’t loud, but it’s persistent.
I find myself listening for things that are no longer here, and that is a failure of discipline I don’t appreciate.
I don’t reach for him in my sleep, and I don’t say his name out loud. I don’t replay conversations or mistakes, because that way lies indulgence, and indulgence has never been my vice. Spite, yes. Control, yes. Indulgence? Only ifyou count the occasional impulse to ruin a man’s life because he smiled at me.
Instead, I fill the gaps with extra hours, longer routes, and jobs that require focus and precision. It works, mostly.
Secretly, I’m hoping Caiden will write.
I hate that.
I hate wanting it like a teenager with a crush and no self-respect.
The tension lives in the waiting, the not knowing, and in the knowledge that if he did, whatever he sent has been sitting somewhere for probably days now.
The address I gave him isn’t accessible from the base, which was deliberate on my part. No one watching what goes out and comes in. Another buffer, one more layer of separation between impulse and consequence.
I told myself it was sensible, that distance would give me time to stabilise before introducing variables I couldn’t control.
That logic has held for six days.
By the seventh day, I’m irritable in ways that don’t match the provocation. I’m correcting people who don’t need correcting and finishing conversations before they’ve properly begun. I catch myself pausing mid-task, my attention drifting somewhere unhelpful, and I have to pull it back with more force than usual.
One of my men asks me a harmless question about fuel logs, and I nearly tear his head off. I don’t, obviously. I’mnot that insane. I make my face do the correct thing, and he walks away alive.
I’m practically a damn saint.
Niko watches the exchange longer than he would usually. His expression is unreadable in a way that irritates me. He used to be easier to read. Or maybe I’ve just been distracted.
I’ve started dreaming, which I despise.
They’re not memories; those I can contain, but possibilities, which I refuse to look at too long.
Possibilities are reckless.
