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"I've never met someone so dedicated to their unhappiness as Ilya, " Asra stated, rather flatly, looking out from opalescent eyelashes that kissed the tops of his cheeks. His eyes flickered from yours to his hands folded neatly on the table , and you could see an expression almost that of vague disinterest cross his visage . He wasn’t completely insensitive to your situation, but at this point you knew that Julian had once been a person that Asra had lived to get away from.
"Fine, I'll leave."
You couldn't bring yourself to hate him. Of course, you knew better than to stick around and listen to his excuses, to allow him to look pleadingly into your flushed face and teary eyes and feign misery with a dramatic flourish of his hand, and have himself painted into your mind as a good person making bad decisions, but you couldn't act as though what he was doing was fine. Julian Devorak wasn't a child – he was capable of letting you know what he found most convenient for the both of you – but why couldn't he just act like an adult about these things?
Why didn't he want you?
"That's not true," you insisted, turning away from your teacher. You pressed both your hands flat onto the table, and looked to Asra , almost pleading for response that would be what you wanted to hear, "Doesn't he deserve to be happy?"
He had taken an entire day to tell you, made you feel special and had shared moments that you could have sworn meant something significant to both of you. You had bonded through a series of intimate events, even if they had been short lived. Though circumstances had always been strange and eventful, whenever you were lost, or unsure of what to do, there he was. It had been a strange, creeping feeling whenever you were around him, but it didn't take long before you realized what had been going on. You wanted him, you really had, and whatever had happened between you and Julian had reflected this desire. You were sure, even, that for a brief, fleeting moment, that he had felt the same way.
And yet, you were wrong.
His expression softened then, and he took your hands in his .
"Don't you?"
Eventually you had stopped running into him.
That night when you had joked about having to stop meeting him in perilous or bizarre or random circumstances to spend time with each other, you hadn’t meant it, but it seems that it became reality anyways. Maybe, it's for the better, you rationalized, and eventually, you had come to believe it. You carried on as the Countess's magician, as the famed fortuneteller of Vesuvia, as Asra's apprentice and shopkeeper. It wasn't as if you forgot about him, but thinking of him at every waking hour of the day wasn't going to do you any good.
Sometimes, though, you couldn't help it.
Whenever you notice his missing presence, you can’t help but feel empty.
You could never hope to win him back, and you wished you knew what had driven him to ever think he could hurt you so bad, but every day you hope that another person treats him well, that he know all the happiness you never gave, that he make back all those wasted times you shared. You wish he were still by your side, that you could make amends for whatever you had done wrong, that it was you he snuggled after dark. You've grown, you've learnt about what really matters, but not soon enough for him. There had been a gaping hole in your memory, but now, there was one in your heart.
In the end, if you could see him, gazing longingly at you from across the crowded marketplace, studying your features as though he was committing them to memory, after you felt as though you had given him enough time to do so, you would turn away.
You sighed, quietly, defeated .
"I do."