Page 106 of Ghost Ribbon

And I couldn’t bear that.

From him most of all.

“No,” I whispered.

His hand came up and pulled me into his arms. He gave me every opportunity to pull away, knowing I wouldn’t.

I buried my face against his shoulder while I stood there in his arms and felt more guilty than I ever had.

Because I was lying to him.

Because I was hiding things from him.

Because I knew, with absolute clarity, that I needed to put an end to this.

Whatever we were.

Whatever this was becoming.

It needed to end soon.

Before he found out.

Before I got too attached to the softness.

Before I forgot that I was temporary, that my body was temporary, that everything good in my life had always been borrowed and never kept.

I couldn’t let him get attached to something that was already breaking.

I couldn’t let him waste his strange, fierce care on someone who wouldn’t survive to deserve it.

Chapter 26 - Alexei

So there had been an upgrade.

Clingy no longer cut it.

I was, at this stage, straight-up down bad.

Two weeks since I had crawled through his window, and I hadn’t gone a single night without doing it again. Sometimes I entered with the need to bury myself in him, but more often than not, I climbed through to find him waiting, or sleeping, or pretending to sleep, and what I wanted most urgently was not to fuck him but simply to hold him.

To be held by him in return, though I would never have said that aloud.

It was rattling me.

I was neither stupid nor a coward. I could recognize that I felt something. The problem was taxonomy. I had spent my entire life in a vocabulary of negative spaces. The absence was what defined me.

So when something began to grow in the hollow where nothing should have been able to take root, I didn’t know what to call it.

It wasn’t obsession.

Not anymore.

Obsession was cold.

This was warmer.

More dangerous.