Chapter Seven

I almost cancelled three times before I made it to the restaurant.

Each time, I told myself the same thing: I wasn't going to fix anything, and I wasn't going back. I was going to say what I hadn't said clearly enough the first time, so there would be no room left for him to twist it into something smaller than it was. That was the whole plan. Say it plainly. Leave.

I'd chosen my clothes carefully that morning, not for him, but for myself — something that made me feel like the version of me who had walked away in the courtyard, not the version who used to check the mirror twice hoping he'd notice the effort. I practiced the words on the walk over, quiet under my breath, until they stopped sounding like a speech and started sounding like something I actually believed.

He was already seated when I arrived, at the corner table we used to call ours, like he'd chosen it on purpose. He stood when he saw me, pulled out my chair the way he always had, and for one disorienting second, my body remembered two years of this gesture before my mind could catch up and remind it why I'd come.

"You look beautiful," he said, and it landed exactly where he meant it to.

"I'm not here for that, Val."

"I know." He sat back down, hands folded, watching me with an expression I used to mistake for patience. "I just missed you. Is that allowed?"

I didn't answer. I'd promised myself I wouldn't get pulled into the rhythm of this conversation, the one where he set the tone and I spent the whole time reacting to it.

"Remember this place?" he said, glancing around like the walls held something sacred. "We came here after your midterms last year. You ordered the wrong thing and hated it and ate mine instead."

I did remember. That was the problem with him — he never forgot the details that made the past feel warm, even while forgetting the ones that made it unbearable.

"You used to laugh so easy back then," he said, softer now, like he was talking to himself as much as to me. "I keep thinking about that. About when it got so hard for you to laugh around me."

For a second, the question caught me off guard, because it sounded almost like self-awareness, almost like the start of an apology I'd been waiting two years to hear. I let myself lean toward it, just slightly, before I caught the shape of what he was actually doing — turning my own pain into a wound of his, something for me to comfort instead of something to hold him accountable for.

"I'm not here to remember things, Val. I'm here to finish something."

"There's nothing to finish." He said it gently, almost kindly, like I was the one who needed convincing of a simple fact. "We had a rough few weeks. Couples go through that. It doesn't erase two years."

"It's not a rough patch. You were with her. You lied about us to her face."

"I told you, that wasn't—"

"I know what you told me." My voice stayed level, which surprised me, because everything under it wasn't. "I'm not here to argue about what happened. I already know what happened. I'm here because I need you to actually hear why I left."

For a moment, something flickered across his face that looked almost like listening. He reached across the table and took my hand before I could pull it back, his thumb moving over my knuckles the way it always had, familiar enough that some old, tired part of me leaned into it without permission.

"I don't need you to convince me you love me," I said quietly. "I need you to understand why I left."

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"I do understand," he said, but it came out uncertain, reaching for the right words and finding none of them.

"Then tell me. Tell me what you understand."

Silence. A long one. The kind that answers a question better than any sentence could.

"Say something, Val."

"What do you want me to say?" His jaw tightened, the charm finally slipping just slightly at the edges. "That I'm sorry? Fine. I'm sorry. Is that what fixes this?"

"I don't want an apology that only exists because I asked for one."

"Then what do you want?"

"I want you to actually see what you did. Not perform regret. See it." I held his gaze, steady even though my chest wasn't. "And I don't think you can. I think somewhere along the way you convinced yourself that wanting me back is the same thing as understanding why I left. It isn't."

• • •

He walked me out afterward, one hand light against my back, and I let him, mostly because arguing about it felt like more effort than it was worth. The night air was sharp after the warmth of the restaurant, and for a second neither of us spoke, our breath showing pale between us under the streetlight.

"I'm not ready to lose you," he said, low, close enough that I felt the words more than heard them.

"You don't get to decide that."

"I know." He stepped closer anyway, and before I fully understood what was happening, my back met the cool brick of the wall beside the entrance, his hand braced beside my head, his face inches from mine. "I just need you to remember what this is. What we are."

I should have moved. I meant to move. Instead I stood there, caught between everything my mind knew and everything my body still remembered, and when he kissed me, slow and certain, some traitorous chill ran straight down my spine before I could stop it, old and familiar and terrifying in how easily it still worked.

For one long second, I let it happen.

Then I heard it — my own voice, distant and small, asking what I was doing. I put my hand flat against his chest and pushed, not hard, but enough. He stepped back immediately, watching me with something like triumph already settling into his eyes, like the kiss alone had proven whatever he needed proven.

My heart was still going too fast, and I hated it, hated that two years of memory could override two weeks of hard-won clarity in under a second. I pressed the back of my hand briefly to my mouth, as if I could undo it, as if my own body hadn't just betrayed the careful speech I'd rehearsed the whole walk over. For one disorienting moment I genuinely didn't know which version of myself had just responded to that kiss — the girl who used to live for moments like this, or someone else entirely, someone I was still in the middle of becoming.

"That doesn't change anything," I said, breathless in a way I hated.

"Didn't it?"

"No." I straightened, forced my voice steady even though my pulse hadn't caught up yet. "My body remembering you isn't the same as me choosing you. I need you to understand that difference, Val, because I don't think you ever will."

He didn't have an answer for that either.

Across the street, half-hidden by the corner of the building, I caught a glimpse of Rhydian waiting by his car — not watching, not intruding, just present, the way he always seemed to be lately without ever making it about himself. I didn't know if he'd seen the kiss. I didn't ask. I just felt something settle in my chest at the sight of him, steady and quiet, nothing like the storm still working its way out of my system.

I hadn't told him where I was going that night. I hadn't needed to. Somehow he'd simply known this was a night I might need someone nearby who wasn't asking anything of me, and he'd shown up anyway, close enough to matter, far enough not to crowd the moment into something it wasn't. I didn't understand yet how a person could care that precisely without ever making it feel like pressure. I only knew that the sight of him, even from across the street, made the ground under me feel less like it was tilting.

"I have to go," I told Valerian, and this time I didn't wait for him to agree.

• • •

I found out two days later, from Neriah, who'd heard it from someone in our shared lecture.

"Apparently Valerian's telling people you're just upset," she said, careful, watching my face for how hard the words would land. "That you'll come around eventually."

I felt something cold slide through me, worse than the kiss, worse than the silence at the restaurant.

"He actually said that?"

"According to half of campus, yeah." She hesitated. "Someone literally told me, word for word — Valerian said you'll come around. Like it was already decided. Like your side of it doesn't even count."

I thought about the restaurant. The wall. The kiss he'd probably already turned into proof of something in his own head, evidence that the story wasn't over just because I'd said it was. I thought about how easily he narrated the world around him, how effortlessly he'd once made me believe his version of things over the evidence of my own eyes.

I stood there for a moment, feeling the shape of it settle into place. He hadn't just refused to understand why I left. He'd taken the whole story and rewritten it into something smaller, softer, easier to survive — a woman overreacting, a relationship on pause, an inevitable return he was simply waiting out. Somewhere in that rewritten version, I imagined, the kiss outside the restaurant probably featured as proof he'd been right all along.

I understood, with a clarity that felt almost violent, that walking away once wasn't going to be enough. Not with him. He would keep narrating my life for me until I made it impossible for anyone to believe his version instead of mine.

"He doesn't get to decide how this story ends," I said, mostly to myself.

Neriah squeezed my arm. "Then don't let him."

I nodded, but underneath it, some small, exhausted part of me was already bracing for how many more times I'd have to say the same thing before anyone — before he — actually believed it.

That night, lying awake, I thought about the wall, the kiss, the chill that had run through me before I could stop it. I didn't hate myself for it, not exactly. I just understood, more clearly than I had in the restaurant, that leaving someone wasn't a single moment you got to walk away from cleanly. Sometimes it was a hundred small moments, over and over, each one asking you to choose the same answer again.

I chose it again.

It just didn't feel as final as I'd wanted it to.