For a moment my heart skips a beat, it flutters a few times before finding its rhythm again. Those words, now a dagger to my heart. He has never told me that before. Deep down I knew, he didn’t have to say it. I felt his love for me; I have for months.

“And I’ll always love you. You were my escape. The air I so desperately needed to breathe. You saved me.” My eyes are burning, with a tsunami of tears ready to fall. “If I’m going to get through this, I need to walk away. Now that your eyes mirror my pain, I —”

Tanner steadies the back of my head and takes my lips into a kiss. He kisses me in a way he has never kissed me before. It’s deep and passionate, tears fall from both our eyes. I open up for him, and I can taste the salt from all of our unspoken words, as our tongues tangle together.

Breaking away he looks at me, and I know exactly what he’s going to say. A sob escapes me, but his eyes are pleading. “Please, do this for me.”

Everything inside me is screaming ‘no’, telling me to walk away now. But over the past nine months this man has saved me from myself, and if this is what he needs to be able to save me once more, to let me walk away from his love. I can do this. I nod. So he picks me up and I wrap my legs around his waist.

Deep blue eyes drink me in while his hands lovingly explore my body. We don’t speak. Our bodies communicate without the need for words; expressing the reality that neither of us are willing to face.

Resting my cheek against Tanner’s chest I listen to his heart rate begin to slow. He presses a kiss to the top of my head, and I fight to keep my eyes open. ‘Don’t go to sleep, Kinsley’ the little voices in my head say, with every ounce of my being I try to listen to them. Because I know when I wake, nothing will be the same.

* * *

Waking up this morning, the reality of last night comes crashing down. My whole world has flipped upside down again, but this time I was the one to flip it. The thought sinks deep down into my stomach where it turns to nausea, sweat prickles on the back of my neck and my heart rate picks up. He is gone. The bed is now cold in the spot where I had fallen asleep in his arms. The only thing left to show me that last night happened is the spare key for my apartment left on the pillow; his key.

I take a shaky, deep breath in. My eyelashes are lumped together from tears mixing with my mascara, and my makeup is smeared across my pillow.