“You’re leaving?”

Prem’s voice seems to heighten in pitch at the words, like a song. It’s an eerie song if ever there was one, not like one she would sing.

He’s sitting down, looking up at her. She’s standing up, her dark eyes cast down to meet his.

When did she become such a beauty? He thinks this from time to time and the thought appears again as she’s giving him this hopeful, sorrowful look. The dark hair not kept in her ponytail and falls in a curtain along the left side of her face, sparks red where the light catches it.

“I’m retiring.” She corrects him.

His heart tightens it’s chambers and ventricles, restricting the flow of blood. He thinks he might faint, he thinks he’s forgotten how to breathe. He wonders if he’s ever been able to breathe right since he met her. Maybe if she leaves, he can finally breathe again.

He looks at her face, at that bittersweet smile painted across her peachy lips and lifting her cheek slightly. Long dark eyelashes flutter when she blinks. He knows the heart shape of her face so well he could repaint it, recite it, reshape it from memory. He knows every mole—the one under the left corner of her lip and the one on the bridge of her nose—he knows every wrinkle, every hair, every shade of tan and flush of pink.

He doesn’t want to breathe again. He doesn’t want her to go.

“Oh,” he says.

There’s something about the way she’s looking at him, standing above him. There’s something in the crinkle between her brows, something in the corner of her upturned lip, something in the way she softly clenches her hands at her sides and unclenches them.

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know how he feels, doesn’t know that he wants her to stay. He doesn’t want her to go, he doesn’t want her to belong to anyone other than him. She’s his.

He’s never been so possessive, so irrational, so controlled by his emotions. There’s something about her that made his blood boil, that made his heart pound, and his skin flush. He was holding onto that something—whatever it was—but he needed to let it go.

She was leaving.