I don’t soften it.
I don’t qualify it.
Because there is nothing to qualify.
She exhales.
“I didn’t think you meant to hurt me,” she says.
Hurt.
The word twists somewhere deep in my chest.
I never wanted that.
Never.
“I don’t want there to be anything between us that isn’t real,” she adds quietly.
Neither do I.
The thought arrives fully formed, solid in a way that leaves no room for hesitation.
“Tell me,” I say.
She doesn’t answer immediately.
“What?” she asks.
“What I’ve done,” I say. “Tell me how I made you feel like that.”
There’s a pause.
Long enough that I wonder if she’ll refuse.
“I don’t want to make it into something it isn’t,” she says.
“You won’t.”
My voice is steady.
Because I need to understand it. Not in theory. Not in feeling. In fact.
“But you need to tell me. So I don’t do it again.”
The silence stretches between us.
Then she exhales.
“It’s small things,” she says carefully.
I wait.
“Like at the pub. When Tommy came over.”
I picture it instantly. The noise. The sudden shift in conversation. His voice cutting through the space we’d been standing in.
“You moved your hand,” she says. “You’d been touching me. And then you weren’t.”