"There was something you wanted to tell me?" he asked, and immediately she balked.

"Don't think so," she said with her most casual shrug. "Anyways, if there was, I forgot it."

"'Kay." And then he started to walk away.

One syllable. It was informal, not at all hostile, but somehow it managed to cut her to the bone. Probably wasn't the word choice, though: a sentence might have become a cudgel, a letter a stiletto, a paragraph a pair of cement shoes.

These analogies were not helping her frame of mind. She could feel imaginary cuts and bruises rise up all over her body until she was mangled beyond recognition, all of it radiating from the gaping hole where her heart was supposed to be. She cursed herself a couple of times over, blaming cowardice, or stupidity, or the weather, or the stars, or a pantheon of gods that she didn't actually believe in-- anyone, anything, so long as it wasn't her fault. Anything, so long as she didn't look back on this an eon from now and say--

"I love you."

He turned around, looking confused and a little bit dazed. She could feel the blood rush to her cheeks; she hadn't meant to say that out loud, but.. but...

"I remembered what I wanted to say," she said, with all the courage of a diver leaping to his death. "I love you. Just thought you might want to know."

A deep breath. A plunge. Deep below stood the uncertainty, unsure if it was a net or water or a jagged rock that awaited her at the bottom. The freefall began, and she could feel imaginary wind stinging against the imaginary wounds, but it was okay.

Because at least they were proof that she could still feel.