Page 179 of Joker

I don’t. I keep moving.

Past her room. Past mine. Out the back door and into the late-afternoon heat where the air feels too bright and too open and not nearly violent enough for what’s happening inside my head.

I stop at the edge of the side lot and brace both hands on the hood of the nearest truck just to have something solid under them while I get my breathing under control.

Not because I’m losing it. Because I’m closer than I’d like to admit. The words replay anyway.

Sometimes this feels too close.

I know what she meant. That’s the problem.

I know she wasn’t calling me Cal. Know she wasn’t saying I’m him. Know she was talking about the way trauma grabs at the shape of things and distorts them until safety starts looking too much like control if it comes wrapped in enough rules and too many eyes.

I know all that.

Still hurt. Still landed. Still cut me open in a place I didn’t think she could reach yet.

Maybe didn’t think anyone could.

I drag a hand over my face and stare out toward the gate where two prospects are posted, one inside the booth, one pacing the line like he’s pretending this is a normal day and not one where my entire body feels like a live wire wrapped in skin.

If I let myself sit still long enough, I can admit exactly why it hurt this bad.

It’s not just what she said.

It’s that I’ve spent the last few weeks rearranging the way I move through this world around her and Lexi without asking myself too many questions about it, because answering them honestly would’ve meant admitting I was already halfway gone before she ever crawled into my bed.

And then today, in one ugly, painful burst of fear, she put me close enough to that man to make my whole body reject the comparison before my brain could catch up.

Not because she meant it. Because she didn’t. Not because she believes I’m him. Because she doesn’t. But because trauma doesn’t always ask permission before it turns the room into something old and ugly.

I know that.

Still doesn’t make it hurt less. It also doesn’t solve the actual problem in front of me, which is that she wasn’t wrong about what this is doing to her.

That’s the part nobody’s saying out loud because nobody wants to touch it.

The increased protection is necessary.

It’s also scraping over every place in her that learned being watched means being owned. That’s not her fault. It’s not mine either. Doesn’t change the fact that I’m standing between a rock and a hard place with a woman I love and no clear way through it.

Love.

There it is.

The word I’ve been dodging like a coward because saying it in my own head makes it too real. Too final. Too big.

I laugh once under my breath, no humor in it at all. “Outstanding,” I mutter.

Because of course that’s where this landed. Of course that’s where she got me. Of course the woman with amber eyes and enough ghosts to fill a graveyard was going to be the one who made me finally admit something I’d been sidestepping with all the grace of a drunk man on black ice.

I love her.

I love the way she laughs when she forgets herself long enough not to be careful. I love the way she brushes Lexi’s hair back without even looking, like her hands have memorized motherhood so deeply they don’t need instruction anymore. I love the way she says my real name only in my room, like it belongs behind that locked door and nowhere else. I love the way she still softens when she sees me, even after everything that’s happened, even after the fight.

And that last one hurts too.

Because she’ll still soften for me and I still managed to put enough pressure on her nervous system to make her body remember a cage.