Page 252 of Ruin Me Gently

She froze, eyes locked on me. But I couldn’t stop.

“She got hurt. And then you—” A sharp inhale. My lungs couldn’t keep up. “Then you got hurt. You got hurt. You got hurt.” The words rushed out. “You got hurt, and it’s the same thing all over again, and I don’t know how to stop it, Lilith. I want to, but I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know—” My hands trembled. My legs shook. My lungs burned.

I squeezed my eyes shut. “I should’ve stopped it. I should’ve known. I should’ve done something. But I didn’t. I didn’t. And now—I should’ve never let you in.” The confession tore out of me, ugly and raw, coated in every ounce of self-hatred boiling under my skin. “I should never have—It happened, Lilith. It happened again. And I can’t fix it.”

I was going under. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t—

“I can’t do this.”

My hands hit the desk so hard pain cracked up my wrists.

She moved. I barely saw it. Just a shift, enough for me to catch the outline of her through the mess in my head, through the collapsing, suffocating weight of it all.

No. No, she couldn’t—

If she did, I’d break.

No, I wasalreadybreaking.

“Silas, what—what are you talking about?” She sounded lost. “What do you mean it’s your fault? That doesn’t make any sense.Noneof this makes any sense.”

She was trying to understand. Trying to dig through the mess I was making, trying to find the thread of logic in my unravelling, but there wasn’t any.

It was just me. The fucking disaster. The common denominator.

“Silas, talk to me.”

I shook my head, hands gripping to the edge of the desk to keep myself upright.

She took another step forward. Too close. Too much.

“Breathe with me. In for four, hold for four, out for four.”

I let out a rough, broken noise—something between a choke and a sob.

“Try again,” she whispered. “In. Hold. Out.”

I tried. I fucking tried. But it wasn’t working. Wasn’t slowing the panic.

“You don’t understand.” My voice was a wreck. “No one does.”

“Thenmake me.”She stepped closer, chest rising and falling hard, like she was barely holding it together. Like she wasn’t sure if she should be furious or terrified. Maybe she was both.

“I don’t—”

She took another step forward and I jerked back like she’d burned me. She was waiting for me to say something. But I didn’t know how to.

“I don’t know how to talk about it.”

Her throat bobbed like she was swallowing back a million things she wanted to say. She shifted, her arms tensing like she wanted to reach out for me but wasn’t sure if she should, like she already knew I’d pull away again.

Her voice came gentler this time. “Then try.”

I pressed my fingers into my temples, trying to get my brain to catch up and work for just a minute. “I don’t know where to start.”

She let out a small, shaky exhale. “Then start from the beginning.”

She wasn’t forcing. Wasn’t demanding. Just waiting. Waiting for me to give her something. Waiting for me to stop drowning.

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