Page 108 of Ghost Ribbon

I was looking at him.

And I understood something.

Maybe I did love him.

Not in a normal way. I wasn’t capable of normal ways. What I felt for Marco was too complex for the simple vocabulary other people used, too full of contradictions. I wanted to protect him and I wanted to ruin him. I wanted to see him smile and I wanted to be the only reason he ever did. I wanted to hand him the world and I wanted to keep him locked somewhere only I could reach.

There was no word for what I felt.

No word I knew. No word anyone had taught me.

But it was there, burning in the void like a star that refused to be extinguished, and maybe I needed to voice it in some way, to let him know.

“Marco.” My voice came out rougher than I intended.

He turned.

His hazel eyes caught the starlight and held it, turning luminous and unreadable. He looked at me with that expression he sometimes had when he was trying to understand something about me.

“Yes?”

I opened my mouth.

The words were there. Jumbled. Too many of them. Not enough. I had never been good at this. At speaking.

But Marco deserved more than assumptions.

He deserved more than silence.

He deserved the thing itself, the closest I could come to honesty.

“Alexei?” His voice was concerned.

I stepped closer. “I have something to tell you.”

I took a breath.

“I don’t really know how,” I began, the words tumbling out now, unstoppable. “I’m not good at this. I know I’m not articulating properly. I’ve never felt in my life and I can’t recognize emotions most of the time, but looking at you, there are things I can see so clearly. My heart does this weird thing. It hurts and it races and it feels too full and I don’t know what to do with that except want to be near you, want to protect you, want to be whatever you need me to be…”

I was rambling.

I never rambled.

But the words kept coming, spilling out of me. “I think I lov—”

I didn’t finish.

Because Marco went up on his toes and pressed his hand over my mouth.

“Don’t,” he whispered.

His eyes were wet. His hand was trembling against my lips.

“Don’t say it.”

I stared at him. The word died in my throat, strangled by his fingers, by his tears, by the terrible conflict I saw in his face. I furrowed my eyebrows.

He was still holding his hand over my mouth, trembling. Then he took a step back. His arm fell to his side, and his tears, which had been gathering at the edges of his eyes, held back by some terrible effort of will, finally broke free. They spilled down his cheeks.