He didn’t seem to have anything to say to that, the wind letting out of his sails. He looked down at his feet, scuffing his shoes along the forest floor before tilting his head back up to look up through the trees to the night sky, squinting hard like he was trying to stop himself from crying.

Even now, going back over the whole thing in my head, I can’t explain it, but that set me off. Watching Damien, the most casually cruel person I’d ever met, the only person who has made me feel even a little understood these past six months, this Tin Man who let me into his dreams, trying his best not to feel anything just … broke me. If he wasn’t going to crumble, then I would, for the both of us.

I felt my knees hitting the dirt beneath me, my torso bending forward like I’d been snapped in half, folding in on myself involuntarily, as a sob was pulled out of me. Loudly, painfully, viscerally. Without a care of being heard or getting my hands dirty as I sank them into the mud and leaves, clutching at the earth like it was the only thing keeping me tethered to the ground, I cried. I cried in a way I didn’t know my body could produce. I never expected to cry like that in my life. In a strange forest with a strange man, my strange self screaming into the ground while my body tried to purge the truth from its own reality.

“Rose…”

I heard his voice distantly, saw the shuffle of his feet in my periphery, blurry through my tear-filled eyes. Something in the back of my mind braced for impact, for empty soothing words, a hand on my shoulder. But nothing came. I sobbed and sobbed, the only moving thing in a still world.

When the storm finally subsided, leaving my body nauseated and dizzy with the effort, I wiped my eyes on the backs of my hands, the only clean parts of them, and looked up. Damien was sitting there, a few feet away from me, his arms around his tented knees, looking down into his lap like he was just … patiently waiting for me to finish.

I sniffed loudly and his head snapped up. We stared at each other, the tears in my eyes mirrored in his, a fraction of what I’d shed but sharper and shinier.

I sniffed again. I don’t think either of us knew how to break the silence.