Chapter 332: Painful jealousy
Cyan
Noah was standing right between Cassian’s knees, close enough that the fabric of their clothes were brushing.
There wasn’t any room for interpretation, no way to misunderstand the meaning of the space between them.
Noah’s hands were resting flat against Cassian’s broad shoulders.
His face was bright red, his mouth moving rapidly as he spoke, his shoulders twisting in that familiar, flustered way he always did when he was embarrassed and couldn’t stop his own tongue from running.
Cassian was just listening. His eyes were locked onto Noah’s face, that rare smile never wavering, his features holding a deep, undeniable tenderness that made my own blood turn to ice water in my veins.
My hand stopped on the chrome. My boots went completely rigid against the linoleum.
Everything inside my head just died.
The relief hit me first, heavy and true. He’s alive. He’s sitting upright. His chest is moving on its own. He made it back.
But right behind that relief, emerging from the dark like a monster waiting for its cue, came the rest of it.
It rushed into the empty space, tearing through my chest until I could barely draw the air into my throat.
That smile... the one Cassian was giving the assistant right through the glass was a look he had never given me.
Not once. Not in all the years I had spent standing in his shadow, executing his orders, bleeding for his name.
Not in all the hours I had spent being the person he called when everything went to hell because he knew I was the only one ruthless enough to clear the floor.
I had loved him from close enough to touch, and from far enough away that my feelings had never mattered to the ledger.
I knew this. I had always known it. It wasn’t a new piece of information.
But knowing a fact inside your own dark bedroom and watching it happen through a pane of clear glass are two entirely different kinds of torture.
It was almost like I forgot he wasn’t mine. No matter how much I wanted him.
Inside, Cassian reached out, his long fingers wrapping gently around Noah’s wrist, pulling him just an inch closer. It was a soft, careful movement... the movement of a man who was still healing but refused to let go of the thing he wanted.
Noah’s flustered expression smoothed out, turning into something quiet and sweet, his palms remaining on Cassian’s shoulders as if they had lived there for years, as if that was the only place they belonged.
My forehead drifted forward until it almost pressed against the cold glass of the window, my eyes wide and burning as I watched them.
The pain and jealousy ran through me in a thousand small, poisonous needles, striking every single vein simultaneously.
It brought a sickening wave of heat to my throat.. the specific, wretched physical sensation of watching the person you love with every broken piece of your soul be loved back by someone else.
I tried to force my hand to turn the handle.
The intention was clear in my brain; I wanted to shove the door open, to break the scene apart, to force Cassian to look at me instead.
But my muscles wouldn’t obey the command. My fingers remained frozen on the metal, my body performing a strange rebellion against my own will, refusing to let me step into a room where I wasn’t required.
I stood there for a long time, the coldness of the pane biting into the skin of my forehead, my hand clamped onto the brass like a dead weight.
Inside, through the thick wood, I heard the faint, muffled sound of Noah’s laugh. It was short and bright.
I closed my eyes, but the sound found me anyway, cutting straight through my eyelids, through the glass, through every wall I had ever built to keep the world from breaking me.
I took one slow step backward. My fingers slid off the chrome handle, releasing it with the heavy, lingering ache of someone who had been holding onto a ledge for too long and had finally let go.
I wasn’t crying. I refused to be a person who wept in a public hospital corridor like a child. My jaw was locked so tight my teeth ached, and my eyes were burning like hot coals, but I was absolutely not crying.
I took another step back, the door remaining firmly closed between us. Inside, the smile was still happening, but it was happening in a world I was no longer permitted to touch.
I turned around.
The long corridor stretched out behind me, empty and stark under the humming fluorescent tubes. It had that flat, institutional grayness that made every afternoon feel like the end of the world.
A figure was standing about ten feet away near the water fountain. He wasn’t moving. He was just there.
Nick was wearing his blue hospital scrubs, his stethoscope slung carelessly over his collarbone, his white surgical mask pulled down around his chin.
His eyes were bloodshot, dark circles bruising the skin underneath them, but they were wide open, fixed completely on my face before I had even finished turning away from the glass.
He didn’t move toward me, and he didn’t say a word. He was just present, the exact same way he had been present on the concrete floor outside the operating room, and in the yellow light of his kitchen at three in the morning, and in the doorway with the blanket in his hands.
His gaze moved across my features, fast and thorough, reading the raw look of my face without letting a single emotion show on his own.
The silence between us in the hallway was thick and heavy.
My eyes were still burning, my jaw still set into a rigid, defensive line, and my left hand, the one that had just let go of Cassian’s door was still hanging slightly open at my side, trembling against my coat.
Nick saw all of it. He looked at my face, then past my shoulder to the rectangle of glass, then back to the way my boots were planted on the linoleum.
He saw exactly how I was standing, like a man who had just taken a massive, crushing blow to the chest and was still deciding whether his knees were going to let him fall to the floorboards.
