Kaz looked out at the blurry horizon, the ship's deck swaying beneath him with the swell of the sea. With the spray from the waves coating his face, he doubted that anyone would have been able to discern that other kind of salt water just below his eyes, and clinging to his eye lashes.
The kind he could never allow another human being to see.
His eyes went down to his gloved hand resting on the railing and he remembered the feel of her hand beneath his own. Remembered her squeezing his hand, just before she'd let go and turned away.
Kaz thought back to Nina's offer, to the heartbeat's moment of temptation, until he had remembered that the places where he'd been broken had made him stronger, had made him who he was, and that to give up one meant giving up the other.
Giving up what he had been made into, what he had made himself into, would leave him with nothing - especially since there was no way of overcoming this one thing that had made it impossible for him to speak up when Inej had asked him to, no, begged him to.
Painful as it was, more so than any physical pain he had ever endured, he was unable to tear down the wall between himself and the world, himself and her, the way she needed him to. And lying to her, even to tell her that he would try when he knew that he would not be able to go beyond removing his gloves in front of her and nobody else, up in his room under the roof, was not and would never be an option.
She deserved better than that.
She deserved better than him.