As if he can sense me watching, he leans forward and looks directly into the peephole. Our eyes meet—or they would if there wasn't a door and a fisheye lens between us—and he says, "I know you're still there. I can see your shadow under the door." A pause, and then with something that might be humor if the situation wasn't so completely fucked: "Let me in, Val."
The nickname hits me like a physical blow. Not Valentina, formal and distant. Val. The way he says it when we're alone, when his guard is down, when he's being the version of himself that belongs just to me.
Belonged. Past tense. Nothing belongs to me anymore.
My hand moves to the deadbolt without conscious decision, fingers closing around the cold metal. I should not be doing this. This is a terrible idea. This is going to end badly—he's going to say something that shatters me all over again, or I'm going to say something that makes everything worse, or we're going to stand here in awful silence until the weight of everything unsaid crushes us both.
But I'm already turning the bolt, already hearing the metallic click of it disengaging, already pulling the door open a crack.
"Promise you're not here to kill me," I say through the gap, and I mean it to come out light, joking, but my voice betrays me by shaking on the last word.
Xavier's expression does something complicated—surprise and pain and something that might be guilt all flickering across his face in the space of a heartbeat. "I'm not here to kill you," he saysquietly, and the way he says it makes it sound like a vow, like he's making me a promise that costs him something. "I promise, Valentina. I just want to talk."
I study him through the gap for another moment, trying to read his intentions in the set of his jaw, in the way his hand is gripping the pink bag like it's the only thing keeping him upright. He looks sincere. He looks like someone who drove across town to have a conversation, not to finish destroying someone.
I open the door fully and step back.
Xavier takes a moment before he enters, his eyes doing a quick sweep of the apartment in that automatic way he has—cataloging exits, threats, details. I watch him take in the depressing beige walls, the shit furniture, the general air of somewhere people stay temporarily before they can afford somewhere better. His jaw tightens fractionally and I know what he's thinking: that this is where I've been living for the past few months, that this is what I came back to after leaving the safe house with its comfortable furniture and actual sense of home.
"You can come in," I say when he just stands there in the doorway, making no move to cross the threshold. "Unless you changed your mind about the whole 'just wanting to talk' thing."
He comes inside—and that's when I notice the wheelchair folded in the hallway behind him, when I realize he must have transferred out of it to stand at my door because he knew I'd check the peephole and seeing him in the chair would have—what? Made me feel guilty? Made me more likely to open the door out of pity?
I don't know. Don't know what calculation he was making, what strategy he was employing. Just know that it cost him something to stand there as long as he did, that he's paying for it now as he turns, grabs the wheelchair and settles back into it with a careful control that can't quite hide the flash of pain across his face.
I close the door behind him and we exist in awful silence for a moment, him in my shitty living room and me standing by the door with my arms crossed over my chest because I need something to do with my hands, need some kind of barrier between us even if it's just my own arms.
"Nice place," he says, and there's no sarcasm in it, no judgment, just a flat observation of objective reality.
"It's terrible," I reply, because there's no point in pretending otherwise. "But it's mine. Or it was mine. Before." Before you. Before the Raiders. Before I had anything worth staying anywhere for.
He nods slowly, and I watch his eyes move around the room again, this time lingering on details—the cartoon still playing quietly on the TV, the empty Chinese food containers on the coffee table from last night's dinner, the jacket I left slung over the couch that has the Raiders patch on it because I couldn't quite bring myself to stop wearing his club's colors even after he kicked me out.
His gaze catches on the jacket and holds there for a long moment before he forces himself to look away.
"You kept it," he says quietly, and I can't tell if it's a question or an observation.
"I—" I don't have a good answer for that. Don't have a good reason for why I'm still wearing his club's patch when I'm nolonger affiliated, no longer welcome, no longer his. "I didn't think you'd want it back."
"I don't." He wheels himself further into the room, positioning himself near the couch but not quite settling, not quite committing to staying. "It's yours. It was always yours."
Was. Past tense. Everything is past tense now.
The silence presses in around us, heavy and suffocating and full of everything we're not saying. My nerves are stretched so tight I can feel them vibrating like guitar strings tuned past their breaking point, waiting for whatever blow is coming, whatever final words he's here to deliver.
He seems to realize this—seems to see the tension in my shoulders, the way I'm holding myself like I'm bracing for impact—because he reaches for the pink bag still in his lap. "I brought you something," he says, pulling out a white bakery box with careful, deliberate movements.
He sets it on the coffee table and flips it open.
Inside is a cake. A real, honest-to-god birthday cake with white frosting and delicate piping that spells out "Happy Birthday Val" in script that's too pretty for the sentiment to be anything but sincere. There are twenty-three candles arranged in a circle around the edge, unlit, waiting.
I stare at it for a long moment, my brain trying to process what this means, why Xavier would bring me a birthday cake after everything that happened, after he told me to get out of his life with such finality.
"It's from Zay," Xavier says into my silence, and something in my chest both lifts and sinks at the same time. Of course it's fromZay. Zay who remembered my birthday, who promised to bring cake, who's been trying to take care of me even when I don't deserve it. "He made me promise to bring it. Said—" Xavier's voice does something complicated. "Said you shouldn't spend your birthday alone."
I don't know what to say to that. Don't know how to respond to the care implicit in Zay using Xavier as a messenger, in Xavier actually following through and bringing it even though the last thing he probably wanted to do was drive across town to see the woman who killed his brother.
"Thank you," I manage finally, the words barely audible. "You didn't have to?—"