DESPOINA
The anger is such a shield for sadness that it does not take long for it to fold. The second he begins to drain it—the second he looks at her and apologizes—she loses her grip entirely. It bleeds from her and she is left as a husk with nothing but her sadness to swell in her, the tides washing up along the shores of her heart. She shifts as he does, and she feels even smaller than she had before. She shrinks, dropping the delicate curve of her nose down to her chest, her inky hair curtaining in front of her iridescent face.
“Don’t apologize,” her voice is small too, a bare whisper that she can barely give form to. “Please.” She forces herself to look up at him, to study the darkness that is his face—to try and find the core of him from within the shadows. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” She had, she knows. She had lashed out and used her endless pain as an excuse for every possible wrong. For hurting others. For hurting herself.
For trying to hurt him.
The next is harder for her to manage and it feels like choking up shattered glass to try—but she still does. “It’s not your fault if you didn’t feel for me the way that I,” she stutters here, heat rushing into her cheeks with shame, “that I felt about you.” She breaks eye contact again, shaking her head, before taking a step toward him to. This time, her face is more open, her black eyes wide and expressive.
“Let me try to be your friend again, Torryn.” It hurts to say his name too, but the pain is a good one, a welcome one. The kind that she would gladly inflict on herself again and again.
“I want to try.”
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do