YIKES Y'ALL. I try to keep updates to two weeks maximum, but life happens, ya know? Back to the office, medical schtuff and a little mental spiral that came from it, more original work, etc. Plus, I knew Quil and Claire were probably going to fight, and I wanted them to be able to fight well. So I had to sit with some things for a bit.

Grief, it's like glitter… What a mess it makes – "Glitter" by Patrick Droney

Quil

He kisses her hair.

Claire freezes, but I am red-hot, and I'm on my feet and out the door before I punch the guy in the face.

My body doesn't seem to remember this is the entire reason we came here. My head doesn't, and my heart doesn't either. And my stomach—I'm going to be sick.

I make it as far as the bushes before I puke.

She's yelling after me; I hear her running. "Quil! Wait!" The guilt in her voice makes me puke again.

She should feel guilty. While I was home, grieving her, doing my best just to keep my head above water, she was here. Moving on. Letting me go.

I wipe my mouth on the back of my hand, just as she stops beside me.

"I can explain," she says.

"I can hardly look at you," I say back, then shut my eyes because I mean that to the core of me.

"Then just listen," she whispers. "Please, Quil. Let me explain. It's not—"

"Not what it looks like?" I straighten to my full height. I'm not ashamed to say I puff out my chest—all the overtime this summer packed my muscles tight. "Because I heard that before, and I can't say this is much better." I lift a hand to the restaurant warily.

She nods, looking down at her feet. "Give me two minutes, okay?"

"Sure, why not," I say sardonically. "What's two minutes when it's already been two years?"

Her lip quivers, and more guilt slices my stomach. I am going to be gutted after this day is over.

She looks like she wants to say something but stops herself.

She didn't used to do that.

Claire

I head back inside as Quil mumbles something about the beach. I feel like I'm trying to collect the pieces of myself with a sieve, one where all the holes are too big and things keep slipping through.

Paitoon is squatting down in front of Bear, handing him a toy.

"Why did you do that?" I ask him. Incomprehension flashes in his eyes, and I realize I spoke in English. I repeat my question for him so he can understand me.

"Do what?" Paitoon asks. I don't know why—maybe it's the shock of seeing Quil here, thousands of miles and hundreds of days later—but I can't tell whether he's being sincere. Could he really not know?

"Kiss me," I say. "Like that."

He stands, and the features that once reminded me of Quil's now seem so foreign to me. His eyes aren't dark and mysterious, they are cold and hard. "I missed you."

"You don't get to do that," I say, but now it's me who can't tell what I'm talking about. Missing me or kissing me. Both.

"He is Quil?" Paitoon says in butchered English, and I don't like the way he says his name, like it's something meant to be mishandled.

Quil is much too precious for that.

"Your eyes are not sad when you look at him," Paitoon says, and those eyes he mentioned fill with tears, because the thing is, I am sad when I look at Quil.

I'm sad for everything I ruined.

I'm scared I waited too long to rebuild.

I find him on the shore, looking out into the deep turquoise of the Andaman Sea. At low tide, jagged rocks slice through the waters to the north, catching unsuspecting boats and surfers off guard. I have a faint pink scar along the side of my left elbow to prove it.

To the south, our left, resort beaches dot the shore as far as the eye can see, before curving out of sight.

We face west. Together.

I deposit a bag of bottled waters and snacks in the sand as I sit down next to him. As I packed it, I thought about the first things I would say to him. There's so much to apologize for, so many things to ask each other.

"I'm not with him," is what I say first, because I think that's what he needs to hear most of all.

"It wouldn't matter if you were," Quil says, and he's going for unaffected but it doesn't work—I know him too well.

I slide off my shoes and tug my knees to my chest. There's a lot of noise around us, but I swear I hear him breathing next to me, the rhythm of his heartbeat.

"When I broke up with you," I start, "I thought it would… Make me hurt less." He scoffs, but I know if I don't say these things now I never will. I push forward.

"I knew I was doing everything wrong. My family, and grieving, and you. I mishandled everything I cared about. I knew I wasn't treating you fairly, stringing you along. I felt like a burden instead of an anchor. So I thought by breaking it off with you, I'd help you heal faster."

He turns to me, disbelief etched into every tired line of his expression. "You must have forgotten how the imprint works. How absolutely gutted—" He cuts himself off, but he may as well have finished. How absolutely gutted he was to lose me, how he felt like there was a hot knife slicing his heart with every beat, every time someone said my name, every time he even thought it.

Because I feel those same things. "Quil—" I swallow against a swell of emotion, blink back stinging tears. "It's completely inadequate, but I'm so sorry. I know usually people say they never meant to hurt you, but I knew from the start that wasn't going to be true. When you can't even breathe right most days because you're in so much pain, you don't care much about how badly you hurt other people."

Something tight flashes in his eyes—the old me would classify it as sympathy, or concern maybe. But this version of me is too slow to the punchline, and it's gone as quickly as it arrived.

"Thanks for being honest," he says, and the words are less sarcastic than his others have been. It is a start.

"I'd say it's the very least you deserve."

He runs a big palm over his haggard face, the beard there I'm still not quite used to but is growing on me. "So, the guy."

"Paitoon," I correct.

"Right," Quil deadpans. "So he's not your boyfriend."

"No," I say, straightening my legs out and digging my toes into the golden sand. "But he would have been if I wanted."

"Have you slept with him?"

"No!"

"Have you kissed him?"

Shame burns high on my cheekbones. "You kissed Callie," I say, louder than necessary.

"That's not what we're talking about here," he gruffs. "And I've already apologized for that every way I know how. Which, for the record, is the most I've apologized for something that was neither my idea nor my fault. Bethany would be appalled."

I can tell he's fighting to stay composed, no matter how hard this is to talk about. His wrinkled shirt stretches over his chest with each controlled breath. His composure makes mine crack a little, right in the middle.

"He tried to kiss me," I admit, and a tear slips out. I look down and it trails my nose before splashing on my thigh. "I couldn't."

I don't even know if Paitoon knows the full story of why. That's something I've kept buried.

"Paitoon's girlfriend, Bear's mother, she… died during childbirth. That's still really common in these parts of the world." I swallow hard. "Her name was Hannah."

"Claire," Quil murmurs, and he actually reaches for me before we both catch him, and stare at his outstretched hand. I grab it, lower it back to his lap. My touch lingers, the warmth of him surging through my cold bones like lightning. It burns. I pull my hand back.

"I met them on the anniversary of our Hannah's—death." I still stumble over the word, and it still feels like swallowing glass. My throat bleeds every time I say the words in relation to my mother. "Bear was crying because it was so loud, and he was only four months old, and all I wanted was to help.

"I had run out of money, and Paitoon's parents—Bussaba and Panya, the people you saw in the photos—they took me in, offered me a job and a place to stay. At first it was just taking orders, bussing tables. But eventually I started watching Bear instead. I was the only person who could get him to calm down."

I snort, wiping at passive tears as they continue to drip off my chin. "And I kept messing up the tickets. So I started watching Bear instead. I kept him busy while everyone else worked in kitchen. I'd take him to the beach and put him down for naps and, I don't know, it was nice to not have to explain myself to someone for once. Paitoon, too. He got it."

"And I didn't?" Quil's tone is sharp, wounded. "She was my mom, too, Claire."

Regret stabs my lungs and steals my breath. My spine is rigid, my muscles locked. I know if I let go, if I relax just an inch, I will break. I am so damn tired of breaking.

Neither of us speak for a long minute, and when I glance at Quil his attention is trained on a bird dancing along the waves. I can tell he's tossing something around in his mind, so I let him.

"How do you go from watching someone's kid occasionally to having him kiss your hair and almost your mouth?" he says finally.

"Grief does funny things," I say. "And I don't even know if it was his or mine. Both, maybe. I didn't lead him on, but I didn't discourage him, either. But I knew he was looking to… replace the girl he lost. A mother for Bear and a partner for him. So when I started to care for Bear, Paitoon started to care for me.

"We were washing dishes at the house. Everyone else had already gone to bed." Quil deserves my honesty, no matter how much it hurts us. "I was telling him about my day with Bear, the new food I got him to try, and he just sort of stopped and looked at me. Told me I was good with him, that he was glad I was in their lives. And we were standing close, and I could tell he wanted to kiss me.

"So when he said 'good,' I told him 'great.' I was hoping…" I don't finish the thought, but he knows. I was hoping he'd play our game, the way you used to. Good, great, fantastic. But nothing these days is any of those things. "But he just smiled and leaned in, and I turned away."

"He didn't try to… force you?" Quil says hoarsely.

"No. He's been really kind to me. They all have." I peek up at him. "I told them about you."

He rolls his eyes. "Easy, Claire. That makes it sound like you still love me."

"I do still love you. Of course I do."

"You have a funny fucking way of showing it," he says. I can't argue with that, so I don't. After the silence stretches a beat too long, he shakes his head.

"You left," he whispers, just audible above the ocean. "You left me."

This is where it all comes back to. The biggest mistake of my life.

"I didn't know how to stay. I thought that if… if we slept together, it would…" The Black gnaws at my heart, sharpens its claws and twists in, rooting itself the tiniest bit deeper.

It's been here, still, all these days later. Some days it's not as loud, and I can still find it in me to laugh and smile and actually mean them. Some days it's only on the edges of me, and I can push it down.

And other days it's the only thing I feel, that lack of color. It throws shadows onto every good thing in my life, discolors all my memories until they're so distorted and ugly they don't even feel like mine anymore. It presses in toward the middle of me.

I've always known if it ever reached the center of my heart, there would be no coming back from it.

"Make it hurt less," he supplies, and I nod.

"But nothing can do that," I say. I clench my hands into fists to stop them shaking. The effort it's taking to dig these feelings up after so long buried is not insignificant. "And by the time I realized that, I was halfway across the world from everything that mattered. Turns out I didn't know how to come back, either."

"I would have come to get you. I would have found you, wherever you were."

My head and heart throb from the pain of these old wounds being ripped open. Something in his tone, his words maybe, makes my breath catch, but I can't put my finger on what.

I have so many more things to ask him, but he lets out the deepest yawn I've ever heard or seen, and I lose my train of thought. The muscles of his neck pull tight, and I suddenly remember the way they feel beneath my mouth. The taste of him, salty like the sea, warm like tea. The taste of me on him.

My cheeks flush, and I look away. I haven't been sexually excited since that night. It's a Pavlovian reaction or something, having him in front of me again.

"Where are you staying?" I say. "Do you need to check in?"

He goes to wipe sleep from his eyes, but sand just falls over his clothes and gets trapped in his beard. I just barely resist reaching over to help him clean up.

"The Grand something," he says. "Booked it during the layover. It's okay, I'm not even—" the word tired cuts itself off as he yawns again.

I grin and get to my feet, brushing sand from my butt. "It's two in the morning at home, and you just traveled for over twenty-four hours. Of course you're tired."

On instinct I reach down to help haul him to standing; also on instinct, he lets me. He's all muscle—more than I remember, if I'm being honest—and mixed with his fatigue it makes him unsteady. He stumbles toward me, and I still him with a hand on his stomach.

Warmth spreads through my veins like honey, and he flexes beneath my touch, which makes it worse, because abs. I pull away without meeting his eyes and stoop down to grab the snacks, still untouched. "Your hotel is just down the beach. Let's go get your shit."

"Claire—" he starts.

It's the familiarity of it his admonishment that nearly bowls me over this time. But I hold my tongue, and he does, too.

Things are so very different than they used to be.