Ezekiel POV
After Viola finished talking about that woman earlier, she suddenly fell silent. A faint sadness crossed her face, as if she had remembered something she wished she could forget.
I noticed it immediately.
For a moment, I wanted to reach out to her, to say something that might make that expression disappear. I even thought about placing my hand on her shoulder, but in the end my body refused to move, and the words I wanted to say never left my mouth.
I simply stood there, staring at her.
I hated this part of myself, the part that could never do the things I truly wanted.
It was the same reason people had always misunderstood me. They called me cold, cruel, and incapable of empathy, believing that I simply did not care about others.
But the truth was that I did care.
I just never knew how to show it.
If I let people get too close, they might eventually see the truth about me, that my hands were stained with someone else's blood, and when they realized that they would leave, just like everyone else in the past.
But with Viola, the thought of that happening felt unbearable.
I didn't want the way she looked at me to change.
Those eyes of hers always carried something I was unfamiliar with. There was no fear in them, no suspicion, only a quiet belief that I deserved to stand beside her.
I was afraid of the day that gaze would disappear and be replaced by the same look everyone else had once given me.
Disgust.
Fear.
Judgment.
And then she would say those same cruel words and leave.
I didn't want that.
We had only been living together for a little over a month, yet somehow that short amount of time had changed something inside me. The thought of returning to the way things were before felt unbearable.
Waking up and not seeing her in the morning...
Returning to that silent apartment that felt more like a tomb than a home.
Living in a world where no one saw me as a person but only as something dangerous, something broken, something closer to a monster than a human.
I didn't want to be alone again.
I didn't want to go back.
And more than anything, I didn't want her to leave me.
The realization made me bitterly aware of how pathetic I had become. I never imagined I would feel something like this for someone, especially when I had long ago stopped caring about what people thought of me.
Yet when it came to Viola, even imagining her hating me made my chest tighten.
While those thoughts continued to spiral through my mind, the car suddenly slowed before coming to a halt.
"We're here," Viola said.
Her voice pulled me out of my thoughts.
She parked near the side of the road where a cluster of trees partially hid the area, then stepped out of the car. I followed shortly after, the cool night air brushing against my face.
"If we walk a little further, we'll reach a cliff," she said as she looked ahead. "The ocean is right below it."
I didn't reply.
My mind was still lingering on what I had been thinking about earlier, and if I spoke now I might reveal something I wasn't ready to say.
Surprisingly, Viola didn't question my silence. Instead, she simply smiled as if she already understood.
Then she began walking down the narrow path.
I followed behind her.
She walked a few steps ahead, and from where I stood all I could see was her back moving steadily along the path. Without hesitation, I continued following her, letting her lead the way without questioning where we were going.
For some reason, I felt like I could trust her completely.
Even if she pushed me off the cliff ahead, I had the strange feeling that I would still follow.
Perhaps that meant I had already lost my mind.
Or perhaps it meant that for the first time in a long time, I wanted to place my trust in someone again.
And I wanted that person to be her.
In my eyes, Viola almost felt unreal, like someone who had descended from somewhere beyond this broken world. She appeared when everyone else had already left me behind, when I was standing at the lowest point of my life.
Because of that, a selfish thought quietly surfaced in my mind.
I wanted that smile of hers to belong only to me...
"We're here," Viola said.
I lifted my gaze.
We were standing at the edge of a cliff, and far below us the dark ocean stretched endlessly beneath the night sky.