Page 75 of Hollowed

And I knew then:

This chapel wasn’t mine.

He was.

And I was the only name he would never carve into the wall.

Because I was the space he filled.

And that was enough.

He bound me again that night.

Not for silence. Not for stillness. Not for obedience. I didn’t need help remembering how to stay.

He did it because I asked.

Not with words. With the way I lay down.

The way I folded my hands across my chest like prayer.

The way I looked at him and didn’t flinch when he pulled the ribbon from the basin where it soaked in warm water and sacred memory.

He knelt beside me, bare to the waist, hair tied at the base of his neck with a leather strip. His breath was even. His movements reverent. But his eyes were wrecked. Starved. Wide with the weight of what he hadn’t said.

He didn’t ask if I was sure.

He never did.

He wrapped the ribbon once. Twice. Around my wrists, crossed and resting over my heart. He didn’t pull tight. He didn’t knot it like a threat. He let it rest like breath against breath.

He looked at me then.

“You were never mine,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

I didn’t have to.

Because I was still there.

He lowered himself beside me.

Not touching.

Not reaching.

Just close.

And I felt it—that sacred ache. The one that doesn’t come from need. The one that comes after. The one that says: we are still here.

He lay on his side, one hand beneath his head, the other resting against the stone between us. His fingertips brushed the edge of the robe.

Not my skin.

But near.

I stared at the ceiling.

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