Chapter 50: Asher
I scrub a towel over the back of my neck like it oves me money.
Water beads down my spine, steam still logging the minut, but I can’t remember whether I actually washed my hair or just stood some kind of malfunctioning robot.
I tried
I really tried not to think about her.
Tried to let the heat scald her out of my head
that
ballet tank top clinging to her like it was designed with evil intent,
her back flexing under my hand as she bent forward like it was nothing,
like I didn’t have a thousand violently inappropiate thoughts at that exact moment,
like she wasn’t pressing every single one of my buttons just by existing.
And then she looked up at me and said,
“Please,” in that voice like honey and defiance and God help me, I felt it
ht down my spine.
Right
She asked me the other day if I was scared of the dark.
She was half–joking, eyes dancing, like she didn’t know the dark bad names and smells and faces for me. Like she didn’t know I’ve seen things that rewired the way my brain responds to silence.
She asks things like that.
Random. Stupid. Pure
She asked me if Navy guys eat real food or just chew protein bars like emotionless drones.
She asked me if I could kill someone with one hand.
She asked me if I’d ever eaten sand.
it face, like she’s lived her whole life in her head and just happened to stumble into the real world and now she’s trying to make
the said it with a straight
Lease of it.
And now I can’t stop thinking about the shape of her mouth when she talks.
When she bends.
When she smiles and doesn’t mean it. Or worse, when she smiles and means it with her whole heart
I finish dressing – dark jeans, gray long sleeve that clings to my chest more than I’d like and step out of the bathroom before I get any worse ideas. My law is already clenched so hard it aches.
Downstairs, Tyler’s flopped on the couch like he’s rehearsing for a mattress compute
Jeans, his football shirt, hair still damp
He’s scrolling something mindless and laughing at
own phone like it told a good joke.
Chapter 50: Asher
“Dude,” he says without looking up, how long does ir
grunt and the chair across from him. My beste is still tigh
like all that water did was weak, beto my skin and weigh nur down
He tosses a chip at me. It bounces off my chest.
“Both true,” he says brightly.
We sit like that for a few minutes.
He starts playing a football highlight teel en mute and rates over it like he’s sports announcer with a Red Bull addiction. I let the noise with mer o
Tyler being Tyler, loose and boud and oblicims.
He’s everything I’m not.
Always has been
After a while, he stops the video and tosses his phone on the table.
“Hey,” he says, tone shifting. “Can I ask you something?”
I raise an eyebrow.
He doesn’t wait.
“That scar on your neck… where’d you get it?”
The room tilts a little.
My spine straighte
It’s not the first time someone’s asked
but coming from him, it lands different.
I meet his eyes.
“Not the kind of story you should hear.”
He holds my BAZE.
for a beat longer than expected.
Then he nods once and trans back.
“Cool. Just… Jooked like it hurt.”
i did
still does sometimes.
I don’t say that.
Instead, I look past him, out the windus. The storm left water streaks on the glass like claw marke
Chapter 50 Asher
Be shifts in.
“What about the one on your eyebrow?”
I lift a hand and brush wet 11. The skin there is roughrt, a permanent iidge..
“A breach gone wrong,” I say simply “Toni was rigged. We didn’t check fast enough. Shrapnel from the frame clipped me ”
“I didn’t feel it at first. Just the heat. Then someone said I was bleeding Whole left side of my face was red
deliver it flat. No drama, Just facts,
The way I’ve trained myself to.
“Were you scared?”
I flance at him.
His expression is weirdly serious.
“No,” I say. “But I was pissed. We should’ve caught it. We got lucky”
He looks away, chewing on that.
Then, quietly: “You always talk like everything’s a checklist.”
I stare at him.
He shrugs, not apologizing
“It’s just–every time I ask something real, you give me the skeleton of an answer. Like the bare minimum a person needs to understand without feeling. anything about it.”
I open my mouth, close it again.
Because he’s not wrong-
It’s how I stay functional.
You don’t make it through warrone,
firestorms by giving feelings a seat at the table
You lock them up. You focus. You get out alive
He changes the subject before I can say anything else
“You think Penny’s coming soon?”
Her name lands in my chest like a punch
My fingers twitch.
“She said she’d meet us here,” I
He grims and leans back again, relaxed and happy, like we haven’t just talked about blood and shrapnel and emotional detachment.
“You know, I think the likes you,” he says suddenly,
Chapter 50: Asher
The words send a shockwave through me.
Heart stops, kicks back up again in my throat.
“What?”
“Not like likes likes,” he says quickly, laughing. I mean like you twn get along. You talk more than expected. I thought pour’d hate each other.”
I say nothing.
Because I’m afraid
d that if I a
open my mouth, s
oth, something dangerous will fall
Like:
I think about her too much.
I notice everything.
I’m obsessed with the way she stands, the way she smells, the sound of her laugh when she thinks no one’s listening
I think I’d burn down whole cities for her if she asked.
But I just grunt again.
Tyler pulls out his phone. “Anyway, I’m texting her. Remind her to wear that dress on likes.
He’s already gone in his head, talking about food and parents and dinner.
I close my eyes, trying to leathe.⠀⠀
And the image that fills the black behind my eyelids is Penny again.
Sitting cross–legged on the floor.
Laughing
once or cereal for the rest of my life,
Telling me
the’s unbeatable at Monopoly and asking if I’d rather eat gravel once of
Her questions are
always ridiculous.
And somehow, they’re the only th
nly thing keeping me from slipping under
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