NOAH
I completed the sentence I had been avoiding for weeks.
Cassian wasn’t just healing from his injuries, he was living in the past with the only person who had ever managed to get behind his wall.
A sharp, hot spike of jealousy hit right in the throat, and I hated myself for it the instant it arrived.
It felt small and pathetic to stand on a public pavent feeling bitter about a na, especially when the man who uttered it was currently unconscious in the hospital bed.
But the feeling wouldn’t go away.
It turned into sothing heavier than anger, the cold certainty that this na mattered more to Cassian than anything I had given him over the last few months.
He didn’t let things matter to him where people could see, but he was weeping for this boy while his body was too broken to even speak to the doctors.
"Stop," I muttered to myself, my voice small against the rumble of a passing bus. A woman carrying a grocery bag looked at for a second before moving past.
I started walking down to the train station because staying still made the thoughts feel louder.
I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t my business while my shoes hit the concrete.
A man’s past belongs to him, especially a man like Cassian. I had known before that he wasn’t the kind of person who handed over his history like a gift; he gave you small pieces when he felt like it, and you either took them or you walked away.
But my brain wouldn’t stop looking at that photograph in my mory. I kept seeing the way they looked together, they were so young, both of them, their faces clear and full of life.
They looked like two people who were so familiar with each other’s skin that they had forgotten to be careful about how they appeared to the rest of the world.
I had never seen Cassian look like that. Not once.
We had had good monts, the night we spent sitting in the middle of a carnival, the ti he watched that ridiculous television show on the sofa until three in the morning with , the way he often made food for .
But those were small windows. Even then, he had always kept his shoulders back and had never been fully unguarded with .
Maybe he was never fully there, the thought crept in. Maybe he was always looking past at soone who isn’t even in this city anymore.
And then ca the sha, hot and dry behind my eyes. I was being jealous of a ghost, a person who might not even be drawing breath anymore.
I hated myself for the thought, and then I hated myself for spending my evening doing this pathetic accounting of who loved who more, while he was lying five floors up. I felt small, like a child who had been left behind on the playground.
I pulled my breath in through my nose and pushed the thoughts down, shoving them deep into that dark corner where I kept everything else from the last three weeks.
Falling apart wasn’t on the schedule for today. I had to go back tomorrow, I had to open the laptop, and I had to sit in that vinyl chair until the nurses stopped looking at .
I pulled the collar of my jacket tight against my chin as I got of the train station and turned down the street that led toward the flat.
The brick front of my building ca into view at the end of the block.
I was already thinking about the shower, the long, hot water that would wash the sll of the hospital out of my hair and scrub the grease off my skin. I wanted to put on clean clothes that didn’t feel like they belonged to a waiting room.
Then I noticed the shape by the iron gate.
A man was standing near the entrance, his back against the stone pillar. He was taking up space with that easy, careless weight that so n have, his boots planted wide apart on the pavent without even trying to look imposing.
It was Mason.
He spotted from across the pavent. His arm went straight up into the air, giving a wide, enthusiastic wave, and a giant grin spread across his face.
It was instantaneous, the sort of happy expression he wore by default. Mason was the kind of person who smiled as naturally as he drew breath.
I stopped dead in my tracks for one long second, my heart dropping into my stomach, before I forced the muscles in my face to form sothing that looked like normal.
I lifted my hand in a stiff return gesture. "Hey," I said, trying my best to sound like a person who wasn’t currently falling to pieces.
Mason’s grin held for the first few seconds while I was still a few yards away. The distance allowed the deception to work, keeping my exhaustion hidden in the dim evening light.
But then I took three more steps, closing the gap until I was standing right in front of him, close enough for him to actually look at my face.
The brightness vanished from his expression.
It didn’t happen dramatically, but the easy, relaxed look completely left his face, even if the underlying warmth stayed in his eyes.
His gaze moved slowly over my features, taking a silent, thorough inventory of the hollows under my eyes and the pale tint of my skin.
He was registering the damage, seeing every mile of the last three weeks written plainly across my forehead.
A heavy, loaded silence stretched between us. Two weeks of his phone calls going straight to my voicemail sat right there on the concrete, unacknowledged and heavy.
"What are you doing here?" I asked. I kept my voice very careful, trying to keep the guard rails up for just a little bit longer.
"I was worried," Mason said simply. He didn’t sound angry; he just sounded honest.
"You weren’t answering your phone. You haven’t been at your desk at the office. The rumors around the departnt—" He cut himself off, shaking his head. "I was just really worried about you, Noah."
"I’ve been busy," I started, the falsehood forming automatically in my dry throat. "There’s just been a massive pile of work to handle. Cassian needed to take care of so urgent things—"
"You don’t have to lie to ," Mason interrupted.
He didn’t say it like an accusation. His voice was just quiet, steady, and factual. "I don’t know exactly what’s going on with you two. But I know sothing terrible is happening. And I know you’ve been carrying the whole weight of it completely by yourself."
I opened my mouth to keep going, to find another excuse, but the words withered on my tongue. I closed it again, looking down at his shoes. "Mason—"
Mason lifted a white plastic grocery bag he had been holding in his left hand. It was the sort of peace offering that only soone who knew inside out would bring, understanding that we needed a mundane distraction to get past my defenses.
"I brought chicken," he said, stating it like the most obvious thing in the world. "And beer. And I am absolutely not leaving this building until you sit down and eat sothing."
A sound ca out of my throat, but It wasn’t a happy laugh. It was a rough, involuntary noise that my body produced without asking my permission, the sound of sothing inside my chest giving way just a fraction under the pressure.
"You’re completely insane."
"Absolutely," Mason said, taking a step closer to . The last bit of lightness disappeared from his face, leaving only a deep, solid concern as he looked straight into my eyes.
"You look terrible, Noah." He said it with the kind of absolute gentleness that only cos from a brutal truth delivered by soone who loves you.
"I’m fine—" I tried again, my voice cracking.
Mason reached out and placed one large, warm hand on my shoulder. He didn’t grip tightly; he just left it there, a steady weight holding to the earth.
"No, you’re not," he whispered. He paused, letting the words sink in. "And that’s okay. You don’t have to be fine right now."
That was the exact mont the room inside started to shake, because the truth was, I had been holding onto "fine" with both hands for three agonizing weeks.
I had been clutching it like a glass rimd with water, terrified that if I loosened my fingers even a milliter, the whole thing would spill over and leave drowning.
And Mason’s hand on was that slight, fatal loosening of my grip.
My throat did sothing awful, tightening into a hard, painful knot that made it impossible to breathe.
"I’m sorry I didn’t call," I stamred, the words rushing out in a ssy, broken heap. "I should have phoned you back. I’ve been a completely terrible friend to you, Mason. You didn’t deserve to be shut out like that—"
"Hey," Mason said, his fingers pressing into my shoulder just a little harder to stop the bleeding.
"I didn’t walk across the city to get an apology from you. I ca here because I was terrified sothing had happened to you." He looked at , his eyes softening. "And looking at you now, I was completely right to be terrified."
My eyes were already betraying . That familiar, stinging heat was rising behind my lids, the sharp burn that cos right before the one thing I had promised myself I wouldn’t do. I hadn’t shed a single tear in three weeks. Not in the corridors, not in front of the specialists, and certainly not like this.
"Mason—" I said it as a desperate warning to my own lungs. Don’t do this. Not here. Not in the middle of the street where people can see.
But Mason didn’t wait. He stepped into my space and pulled forward, not with so grand, dramatic gesture, but with the simple, easy movent of an arm wrapping around my shoulders.
It was the side-hug of soone who had known , soone who knew that if he asked if I wanted comfort, I would say no, so he had to make the decision for .
The dam didn’t burst all at once. It started with a wetness hitting my eyelashes, the small, hot drops already moving down my skin before I could lift a hand to wipe them away.
And then, everything just went.
It wasn’t a beautiful sight. It wasn’t one of those quiet, dignified monts where a single tear rolls down a clean cheek.
It was the ugly, shaking sort of sobbing that cos out of a person who has spent far too long being useful, far too long being the stable one, and has just been told that they are allowed to stop holding the roof up.
I buried my face straight into the rough wool of Mason’s coat, standing right there on the dirty pavent outside my building.
People were walking past us on their way ho from the station, their boots clicking against the stone, but most of them didn’t even look.
The city had seen a thousand breakdowns just like this one on its street corners; we were just another piece of the background.
"I don’t know if he’s ever going to wake up," I gasped out between the heavy, ragged breaths that were tearing my chest apart.
The words felt like broken glass in my mouth. "I don’t know what to do, Mason. I go to that hospital every single morning and I sit in that horrible chair, and I just... I can’t do anything for him. I can’t fix his body. I can’t make him open his eyes. I just sit there and—and—"
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