Does he wish that she no longer loved him?
It would make things easier, perhaps. Easier to think that it was a clean cut—that it was over and that he would live the rest of his days with the wound. Easier to think that he could simply sink into the agony and let it wash over him—deal with the aftermath. But this? This is so much more difficult. It is so much more painful to look at her and now that there is something still there, something alive and burning.
He grits his teeth against the pain of it but forces himself to look at her still, to stare into the sun until all of his vision is gone. Plume isn’t sure whether he is relieved that she has not shared all of herself with this other man or whether it hurts worse to think that they have been destroyed for something no grander than what they share, but either way, he stays silent—trying to find his way. Trying to find anything at all.
“I have never cared much for what I deserve,” he finally manages, his voice thick. The truth is that he knows exactly what he deserves—how little it is. He knows he has a bastard heart that does not love the way that it should. That he has destroyed others. That he has coveted. That he has been weak. He has never cared for what he deserved, because, in the end, he knows it was never anything as much as her.
“All I ever wanted was you.”
He feels flayed open, cut straight to the bone, and he isn’t certain how he will ever survive it. How he will be able to wake up each morning knowing that he has finally lost that which matters the most to him.
“So what do we do now?”
PLUME
but my heart, it don’t beat, it don’t beat the way it used to