asuuna asked:
bittenred answered:
I TRIED To SKETCH THE RIGHT THING FOR LIKE AN HOUR BC I WAS CRYING

“Don’t,” she says, voice aching in her throat at the resolved expression he wears.
“I love you,” he tells her.
Her heart breaks. Shatters. The whole world seems to turn on its side, upside down. “You can’t.” The tears are coming fast now – she cares for him, she does, but she cannot nurse it. She cannot indulge in him. She cannot love him, not if she wants to live her life without regrets.
He touches her cheek softly. “I can. I do.”
The breath catches in her chest, rattling as she drags in as much air as she can, raising a hand to push him away. How can he be so reckless? Isn’t he always telling her to protect herself; why won’t he do the same? She wants to scream at him for it. Stay away from me, she thinks desperately. Stay away. The words stick in her mouth, unsaid, because they are a lie.
“Oliver -”
His thumb slides over her cheek, brushing away the tears, spanning the spattering of freckles. “I know you don’t love me. You don’t have to. It’s best if you don’t.”
Her lip quivers. “They why would you tell me?”
He smiles sweetly, his expression so whole and unbroken and sure that it makes her heart hurt more. “You need to know that you are worth following, trusting, and loving.” His other hand reaches up to cup the other side of her face and her hand remains there limply on his chest. “I will always be on your side, Nessa. The whole world could be against you and I’d still fight for you.”
The tears are hot. Fresh. “I can’t choose you.”
“I know.”
“I can’t love you, Oliver.”
“I know. It’s okay.”
She wants to say, no its not okay. It’s not. A lie he believes in so fiercely that it is his truth. She wants to say, I want to love you. She wants to say, I do. Instead, she stands there with her face in his hands, the moonless night hiding them in the garden shadows. Instead, she cries for the girl who desires a life without restraint and a boy too far out of her reach. Her heart rests behind an iron wall, guarded by denial and reality. He will never see it.
Her hands push him away and he lets her. “I need you to leave me alone,” she whispers, voice hitching over a sob that catches in her throat. “I can’t – Oliver, I can’t - “
He recoils from her, but when he speaks, he sounds resigned like he expected this. “That won’t be a problem, Princess,” he tells her, still soft, still warm. “I leave first thing in the morning for the harbor city. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
Her traitorous heart, straining against that wall. How can she stand here and tell him to leave when the next words that come to her are Stay and Don’t go? “But you are coming back?”
He goes very still at the transparent longing in her voice. She wonders if he knows, has read it in the lines of her body, that she is a walking contradiction. That her choices around him are made out of duty and not desire. “I’ll come back.”
She reaches up to wipe away her own tears. “Okay.”








