Page 276 of Eternal
AZRA
“Apologize” by OneRepublic
Present
We talked a lot tonight.
I told him about Vik, Kat, and me. How the dogs never stopped waiting for me even when I disappeared. How we grew up like limbs of the same body until one day, I wasn’t allowed to see them anymore.
Until my mother started unraveling.
Her mind, her job, her family, the home she wanted so bad, everything crumbling at once. I told him I was just a kid when Alexei left her and went for most of the week somewhere else with my little brother, like he deserved to have a childhood more than I did.
Told him how, the second he walked out, it was like the whole weight of my mom’s sadness got dumped on me.
That my shoulders got handed her pain, and I learned, too early, that men leave. And that’s when love started to feel like a warning.
I told him how I watched her break, how her crying at night made me stop believing in anything that could last, anything stable.
Told him she even stopped letting me go to school because she didn’t like having me outside the house.
That I even stopped seeing my little brother for a while. Even when I called Alexei, begged him to let me talk to Eren or just see him. Or when I used the kitchen phone to ask him to come because Mom wasn’t feeling well and I was scared, but he’d just tell me to stay in my room and not let her open the door because she was just sad, and it could be dangerous.
And he just…listened. He sat there, quiet, like my words deserved space, like I had the right to feel, to express myself in ways no one ever let me.
He gave me my voice back tonight, when I thought I had lost it, when I believed it was stolen from me forever.
His phone lit up a few times, calls, texts, whatever storm he was ignoring, but he never answered. Not once.
Probably the people who are waiting for him to tell them if he had any new information about me. If he had a plan to end me.
He said he was sorry… Even though the little voice in my head screamed that it was too late.
Too late to say sorry, too late to change what had already awakened my heart.
I wanted to be mad at him for everything. For the mission, the betrayal, the silence. But he never answered their messages. He never stopped looking at me like I was the only thing that mattered.
Maybe that’s what poison looks like from the outside.
Needing something so badly it seeps into your veins, softly, sweetly, until you start to believe it’s the good kind of pain, like it’s not actually killing you quietly.
So I kept talking.
He didn’t interrupt, he asked the right questions, the ones no one ever dared to ask, and for the first time, I answered. I told him things I’d buried so deep I forgot they had words
Why was I trusting him?
Maybe because for the first time in too long, my heart wanted to,Iwanted to believe I could have a future that didn’t hurt to imagine.
Maybe I could befree, not healed, not whole.
Justfree…
We went to bed after this long conversation.
I only had his t-shirt on, nothing else, and we’d never slept in the same bed like this before. But tonight, I climbed into his, like it made sense, like I hadn’t just told him everything ugly in me.
The alcohol faded away completely, I could feel my body sobering, my heart not knowing what to do with itself.
