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I’d held onto her as long as she would allow. Which, despite what we’d just shared, had been very little. Her body was warm and flush and left an ache in me when she got up to dress.
Watching her move with limping efficiency made my heart clench with want and something else entirely. Pain? An emotion that cut me as painfully as the quick stab of a sharp blade.
Just look at how quick she wanted to leave.
Soon, I’d be forced to do the same.
Not that I could tell her now when we’d just shared our bodies and hearts. She would think I was abandoning her to pain and sorrow. That I’d tricked her for my own gain like that bastard before me had. But would it be better to leave in the shadows of the darkness? To disappear, leaving nothing but the traces of a shadowed memory in the back of her heart?
I could. It was my nature. To be a trickster. A heartbreaker.
She turned and smiled at me and I returned the gesture. I smiled more around her than I ever had in my entire life. I knew why she brought out the best in me. Even if we hadn’t said the words aloud, our bodies had confessed what our mouths couldn’t.
“I’ll see you later?” she whispered. There was such hope packed into that single question that my heart fractured in my chest because I knew I was going to have to lie to her.
That I was going to break her heart at some point, some time, down the line.
“Yes,” I said.
But even if I left, I knew that no matter how hard I tried to get rid of it, the one being followed by shadows would be me.