She spoke it as if she'd been rehearsing the weight of the words on her lips: "I love you."
It was all part of the plan. I'd constructed the circumstances so she would confess — the delayed responses, the chilliness, the small omissions that drew her in until she had no other option but to move forward. I'd been anticipating it eventually. I hadn't anticipated it to be so quickly, or so intensely. The timing struck me anyway, like a sharp wind that left me breathless.
For an instant I stood there, gaping, my mind grasping for whatever response would maintain everything tidy and within my grasp. The response flew out, worked out: "It's. too sudden." I imposed a smile, said it as if it were an everyday inconvenience. Keep it light. Keep her from seeing the cracks.
Her expression altered in a half-beat of time. "So you don't love me?" Her tone wasn't wrathful. It was tiny and stunned and vulnerable, the very thing I'd worked so hard to provoke.
"It's not like that," I said, rehearsing the proper inflection. "I like you. But we were student and teacher — this is complicated." The words felt robotic. I added on the act: concern, distance, the attitude of one evading a simple trap.
She blinked, and then the line broke. "So it's okay now — we're the same age." The sentence was a question and a plea simultaneously. Tears appeared before I could register the movement. She began crying, and the noise was sudden and animal-like — not the calculated tear she had once used to influence teachers, but something primal.
Something in my chest was wrenched. For a moment, my plan seemed tenuous, ill. I had meant to make her hurt so she'd cling to me; I hadn't meant to make her break. The two things I had etched into my marrow after everything that shattered me — people use other people as tools and never be weak again — were still scrawled deep, imprinted in my mind. They instructed me to go ahead with the plan. They informed me dependence was a triumph.
But hearing her cry, sensing the immediate sharp hurt of another human shattering due to my creation, guilt burst forth in surprise. I was accustomed to seeing others suffer; I was not accustomed to being the reason for it.
"Anj," I blurted, awkward. The practiced words disintegrated. "It's fine. I enjoy you.". Don't cry." The fib slipped out thin and urgent, but the hurt sound of her crying had already settled in my chest. It took almost half an hour to get her to breathe evenly, to quiet her hiccups and stop that raw sound. I sat with her on a bench and uttered little things — soft, futile stitches — because silence felt like confessing how empty I'd been.
When she steadied enough to walk, I thought of a café. We needed somewhere to be normal, to collect ourselves, to pretend the world hadn't flattened. The coffee shop smelled of sugar and warm milk, one of those secure smells that makes confessions feel less risky. We ordered; then the uncomfortable silence dropped between us like a light blanket.
She was quiet, reserved, nibbling at her utensils. I silenced the room with din — inane conversation initially. "I got a lot better," I stated too triumphantly, voice rasping for ordinariness. "From sixty-eight to a clean hundred in the exams."
She smiled, small and proud. "I also got better. Thank you." The expression of gratitude in her voice was real; that single sentence carried a weight that felt like reward and threat both.
We strolled through the comfortable subjects — parents, school, minor things about our days. Food was brought in and for a bit the conversation was relaxed. Then the fringes crept back. The talk went deeper, into things that you only reveal once you trust someone enough to tolerate the truth.
She inquired about my family, and I spoke little: the neat story that suited a son who had succeeded. She discussed her mother and the small traditions of her household. We exchanged memories of childhood. The shared space was genuine, and for a moment I forgot about the parts of myself that I had kept hidden.
When she inquired about hobbies, I lied. It was automatic and required. "I enjoy reading, chess, and jogging," I replied, the all-purpose response that conveyed nothing. The reality — the one that would ruin the facade — was nastier and darker: I enjoyed manipulating strings from behind and, short of that, forcing things. I'd become skilled at warping individuals into forms that were convenient for me; occasionally it was physical, sometimes it was mental. I'd shattered boys in alleys, shattered girls with emptiness. I could never speak it out loud.
She spoke of small, harmless things: the scent of new books, the pleasure of completing a chapter, the manner in which she preferred to work through problems on paper. She was innocent, in the old-fashioned sense — not naive, but unmarked by the specific cruelties that I had mastered. For months I'd treated her like another variable to manipulate, an angle to work until she fit the picture. But she had never been merely a variable. Something about the way she watched solutions emerge on the page, the way her brow folded when she concentrated, chipped away at the sharpness inside me.
The truth I had concealed pulled on my tongue. I had been with other girls — thoughtless, transactional affairs that I wore around me like a temporary hat. She was the seventh. I had not ever told her. It would muddy the neat story I had constructed around myself: the competent, contained boy who taught and safeguarded. Telling it would be to admit how much I used people to cushion the edges in me.
As the café cleared and the street chilled, I began to feel the tiny, perilous tilt once more. She wasn't a plan any longer. She was a human being who knew mathematics like I knew control, someone who could be remade by kindness and who could, by existing, remake me in turn. Knowing that was as awful as any battle I'd ever faced.
I had been cruel; acknowledging it didn't repair anything. But sitting there, hearing her recount a childhood that smelled of hot milk and worn books, I began to feel something release. It was not remorse, precisely. It was acknowledgment: cruelty carried heft. So did the hands that mended.
When we stepped out of the café, she moved a little closer than previously. She didn't push me with questions regarding my history. She just accepted the little, stuttering apology I could make. I vowed not to make her plead with me for my attention anymore. I meant it in that immediate, crude way a newly-made promise can mean on a still evening.
The boundary between calculation and emotion had grown fuzzy — not lost, but worn down at the edges. I had craved dependence. I had designed it. And now that I had it — now that her tears and her trust were no longer tools but living entities — I sensed the tentative, uncertain awareness that I might not be able to cling to the human being I had managed to become for very much longer.
She may transform me. Or I may shatter her. Either possibility hung like a weight and a charge between us as we walked home beneath the naked branches, and for the first time in many months I did not know which I would rather have.