Chapter Text
“What do you want me to say, Ed?”
“I dunno, maybe ‘sorry’—”
“Well, I’m not!”
They both freeze.
Ed tries to tug his hand back. Stede clings to it.
“I’m not saying—Ed, all that time we could have had—” He squeezes his eyes shut. Thinks about a decade spent learning to love Ed, cataloguing preferences and pet peeves. About a butterfly’s wing, the precarity of the present. “I don’t want to go back,” he says, pleading. “I just want—”
Just let me love you, he almost says. As if it’s a choice. As if he could do anything else.