who makes me want,” he bites out, the tendons on his neck standing taut. “I want. So many things, you understand? And I don’t know what it means. I don’t fucking know. I don’t understand and it terrifies me. It shakes me right down to my soul but still I want to find out. I want to know. I want to know why it hurts to see you cry. Why it hurts when you’re in pain, when someone upsets you. Why the thought of you in that godforsaken place with barred windows makes me want to break something. Break the world. Why it makes me sick to my goddamn stomach, whenever I think of you walking away from me like you did that night. I want to know what it all means. Because I’ve never felt this way. I’ve never felt this… need. This craving. Not until you. Not until you walked up to me that night at the bar like a vision of some sort. A vision that haunts me. That haunts my body, my soul. My heart. So yeah, you haunt me, Salem.”
His eyes are glassy and shiny by the time he finishes and I’m a mess too.
I think my eyes reflect the same glow. The same brightness.
I think my heart is beating just as fast as his when I blurt out on a thready whisper, “I know what it means. I know why.”
His nostrils flare, his eyes sharp. “Why?”
I let go of the desk then.
I unclench my fingers from around the wood and bring my hands up. I put them both on his chest, flat and splayed.
And he shudders.
Violently.
I think he even rips the pages he was tormenting. I hear the sound and it echoes in my stomach.
In all the places that were left hollow in my body ever since the night when the cold and brutal snow came to the earth.
“The fact that you write letters to me every night. The fact that you stole and that you hurt when I hurt. The reason that I haunt you is because you haunt me too. You’ve been haunting me for eight years. And it only means one thing.”
Finally, he brings his hands away from the desk too and puts them on my face. He cradles my cheeks and tilts my neck up. “Say it.”
I blink.
I take a deep breath and fist his t-shirt, before I reply, “It means that you love me.”
Again, a shudder goes through him.
But this one is even more violent. It’s an earthquake.
His whole body shakes. His eyelids flutter. His grip flexes.
It’s like an explosion inside his body.
The fall of a mountain inside his chest. The fall of a bridge, a building inside his gut.
The fall of him.
But it’s okay because I’m here to catch him.
I’m here.
“I was wrong the first time,” he whispers, his fingers burying themselves in my hair. “I was wrong. I didn’t know for eight years. I didn’t want to be wrong again. I didn’t want –”
I shake my head, my heart writhing inside my chest. “You’re not wrong. You’re not. This is what it feels like.”
His lips part and a breath escapes him, loosening up his body and fanning over my lips, hot and sweet. “This is what it feels like.”
“Yeah. You love me.”
“I love you,” he whispers, as if testing the words in his mouth.
I think he likes them, the taste of them.
Because he says it again and he says it strongly, with his possessive, needy fingers twisting in my hair. “I fucking love you, Salem.”
That’s when it hits me.
It hits me right in the center of my chest.
He loves me.
Arrow loves me.
That’s why he’s been writing me letters. That’s why he hasn’t left. That’s why.
Because he loves me.
Because I make him want.
Because I want…
Because I’m the girl for him.
“You love me,” I whisper again, my eyes getting blurry, a smile trembling on my lips.
His jaw clenches for a second before he whispers gutturally, “I know I hurt you, Salem. I know that. I know I don’t deserve you. You were right to send me away at the hospital. You were right to scream at me and hit me and… I’m rude and uptight. I have so many rules. I could be so focused and self-centered. So emotionally stunted. I have this sickness, this need to be perfect all the time and it can consume me. But I’ll do everything in my power, every fucking thing in my power, to make you happy. You said that to me,