Page 58 of Broken By Silence
“You still want to hurt me?” she asks.
I shake my head slowly. “No. Not anymore. I never really wanted to hurt you. I just wanted to share my pain with someone.”
“Then what do you want now?”
For a moment, I can’t find the words. Then, hollowly, I say them. “I want forgiveness. I want to believe I’m capable of something morethan destruction. I want to know there’s something left of me that’s worth saving.”
She should walk away. I deserve it. I deserve the emptiness, the silence, the closing of the door.
But instead, she steps forward.
It’s such a small thing. Barely a shift in the air. The sound of her feet against the floor is softer than breath. But for me, it’s an earthquake.
My chest tightens, a hard, burning knot. My first thought is that she’s coming closer to hit me, to spit in my face, to finish what I started all those years ago. I deserve that. Part of me wants it.
Pain, I understand.
Pain, I can take.
But she doesn’t hit me. She doesn’t recoil. She just moves toward me like I’m not poison. The air smells like her—warm and human and sharp, like soap and rain on concrete. My pulse is hammering so hard it shakes my ribs. I can hear the blood in my ears, the old reflexes screamingbrace, brace, brace.
I don’t move.
I don’t breathe.
Her face is calm, but her eyes are full. Anger, grief, something I can’t name.
Something I’m too afraid to name.
She’s so close now I can see the little tremor at the corner of her mouth, the way her fingers twitch like she’s reaching for something she isn’t sure she should touch.
I think of my father’s hand, shoving me forward.Take what’s yours.
I think of the word carved into my back.Coward.
And for the first time in years, I feel… nothing. No rage. No armor. No mask. Just a hollow, shaking boy kneeling in front of someone he’s destroyed, waiting for a verdict.
I shut my eyes.
If she hits me, I’ll take it.
If she walks away, I’ll let her.
If she says she hates me, I’ll carve it into my skin next to the others, and it will be no less than what I deserve.
But then I feel warmth.
Her fingers brush mine, and the breath I’ve been holding collapses out of me. “You broke me, and seeing this can’t erase it all… but I do get it.”
I want to tell her she’s insane, that she should run, that nothing good lives in me. But the words won’t come. All I can do is stand there, trembling like a man who’s been handed something fragile and holy that he has no right to hold.
Her eyes don’t look like disgust. They look like defiance.
They look like a girl staring down the monster under her bed and refusing to be afraid anymore.
We sit back down,neither of us saying anything, and she’s distanced herself again. Like everything I’ve told her is pressing down on her more and more.
Finally, I break it with a whisper. “Will you drive me somewhere?”
