Zenny turns to me, her face frozen.

“What did you say?” she whispers.

I’m reaching for a handful of paper towels to wipe off the oil and…other things. “I said I love you. Now hold still for me, please.”

She bats my hand away before I can start trying to clean her. Her smile is gone, her eyes are wide, and her entire body is tensed—a frightened deer, ready to flee.

“You…love me?” She says it like I just confessed to fucking microwaved melons in my spare time; her words are filled with horror and near-revulsion.

“Zenny.” But before I can think of anything else to say, before I can even get a handle on the blistering, wailing hole in my chest—the hole that she made—she keeps going.

“You said, when we started this, you said we wouldn’t fall in love!”

“Let me clean you up first.”

She backs away from me. “You said,” she accuses.

I sigh and settle for extending the paper towels to her. She takes them warily. “I never said that,” I tell her. “You said that I hadn’t brought it up. And then I said I didn’t think it would be a problem for you.”

Something wounded flashes in her eyes, bounds away faster than I can trace it to its source. “And do you want it to be a problem for me?”

This feels like a trick question. One I should be old and wise enough to answer, and yet I can’t answer it safely, because I’m not wise. Everything with Zenny has been new from the start, and this is the newest thing of all. Loving her.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask carefully.

She scrubs at her body without meeting my eyes. “You know what it means.”

She’s not baiting me, I know she’s not, and yet I can’t help but feel hurt. Hurt in the kind of way where you’ve made yourself vulnerable and someone else has made you feel foolish for it. And extra hurt because I knew better, I knew better, I knew I shouldn’t have forced her to hear this thing that only makes her life harder. And on top of it all, I know it’s stupid to have done this and then to pull the I’m a sad boy routine on her.

And then I see that crushed look on her face again and her trembling chin and she’s so young. So, so young.

“I don’t want you to have any problems, not a single one, not even me. When I told you I wanted to be your dragon outside of the castle, I didn’t mean it like…like I’m the only one who gets to keep you hostage. I meant it like I wish I could burn everything bad away in your life so you can do whatever you want.”

She looks down at the used paper towels in her hands, and I hate how cheap this moment feels, how tawdry. “Honest guy thing, Sean. Do you want me to love you back?”

Desperation crowds inside me, murders of flapping ravens’ wings in my chest.

There’s no right answer. I can lie and say no—a lie she’ll see through, and a lie given when she’s asked for truth. Or I can say yes, and lose her trust anyway.

I don’t know what a good man would do in my place. I can only guess at what an unafraid one might do.

“Yes,” I let out in a long rush of breath. “Of course, yes.”

“Which means what exactly?” she whispers, and she finally looks back up at me, her eyes full of tears. “I leave the order? I don’t take vows? Surely you don’t mean that you’ll be content to hang around the sides of my life, wearing my favor to tournaments and writing me poetry? Because I can’t give you anything after my vows—not my time or my body or my heart. It will all belong to God.”

God again. Stepping in and claiming everyone in my life with His jealous demands.

I close my eyes, trying to hold back this wall of—I don’t even know what. Fear and loneliness and anger and love, just so much fucking love. But the wall is there, it’s looming, it’s crashing down on me.

“Yes,” I finally let out. “Yes! Dammit, Zenny, why shouldn’t I want you to stay with me? Why shouldn’t I want you to love me back?”

“Because loving you back would mean giving away myself,” she whispers.

Cold silence follows her words, and we both stand naked, awkward, still damp with each other. Let it go, Sean, my better nature cautions me. I’ve read enough romance novels to know that it never goes well for the hero when he pushes the heroine, and I’ve absorbed enough human decency to know it’s not my place to ask her to give up anything—especially not something she’s risked her family’s approval and all her time and energy to work for. And I know enough about myself to know I’m feeling anger and grief over my mom, another person God is taking, and that’s not Zenny’s fault.

I know I’m not being fair. I know what I want is not as important as what she wants.

But.

But but but—

“I don’t think that’s true,” I say, letting the wall crash down on me, crash down on us both. And I’ve just fucked up everything by saying that, so I keep going, keep burying us in the rubble of my selfish wants. “You know what I think? I think you’re frightened. I think even the possibility that you might not be suited for a nun’s life terrifies you. I think you’re still worshipping an idol of that Future Zenny, because not worshipping her means all the pain and hard work you’ve done has been for nothing.”

A tear spills out one eye, tracking slowly down her cheek and along her jaw, where it drips onto the used paper towels. “You’re just like the rest of them,” she says thickly. “Just like my parents. Just like my teachers. You want me to have any other life than the one I’ve chosen.”

“I just want there to be some kind of middle ground,” I say, stung that she’d lump me in with the other people in her life who’ve held her back. “Look at my brother! You can still serve God and—”

“And what? Be your whore at the same time?”

“Shit, Zenny,” I say, really hurt now and really furious. “Is that all you think I want? Does my love seem that cheap to you? I want you to be my fucking wife.”

“No, Sean,” she says, fully crying now. “You just like having sex with me. You think that’s love, but it’s not.”

I take the paper towels out of her hand and throw them away because I’m sick of looking at them, sick of looking at my cum-rags in her hands.

“Maybe I don’t have any experience with love, but here’s what I know. You are the most interesting person I’ve ever met, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. And if you told me right now that I could never fuck you again, I wouldn’t bat an eye because it’s not your body I want—it’s you.”

I come back, and I can’t stop myself from reaching for her because those tears, those tears, but she steps back again, not letting me touch her.

“Come here,” I say in a low voice.

“You don’t get to do Bossy Sean right now,” she says. “Not even a little bit.”

Something claws at the pit of my stomach. “I wish I could,” I say fiercely. “I wish I could tell you to stay.”

“You don’t get to control me,” she seethes back immediately, her hands curling into determined fists at her side.

“And you don’t get to throw me away just because I admitted something you must have already known!”

“I can’t do this,” she tells me, tears blurring her voice, shining on her face. “I’m not going to choose you, Sean. I can’t. It’s not the plan.”

“Right,” I bite out bitterly. “Who am I compared with God?”

She bends down, jerkily grabbing at her clothes. “This was a mistake,” she says. “This whole month was a mistake.”

“So now you’re just writing me off? You’re just going to quit me because it’s gotten hard?”

She whirls on me, eyes blazing underneath her tears. “I’ve never quit a fucking thing in my life because it was hard. I’m cutting you out because you’re hurting me. Because I thought you were the one person who knew me and understood what I wanted, and now I know you’re only thinking about yourself!”

“You asked me to do this precisely because I don’t understand why you’re doing it,” I retort, leaning in. “You can’t be upset that I still don’t understand.”

“No,” she whispers, her voice fading. “The problem is that you understand, but you still want me to be something different. And that’s worse than not understanding at all.”

That silences me faster than a hand around my throat.

She pulls her shirt and jumper on and steps into her sneakers. “I’m going to swing by your apartment tonight to get my things. Please don’t be there.”

There’s a moment, both grossly selfish and possibly righteously hurt, when I think about my mom in her new ICU bed—and then I realize Zenny doesn’t know. I didn’t tell her this afternoon; there wasn’t a good time and I didn’t want to weigh her down with it, and I just feel like there has to be a rule against having your heart broken while your mom is dying.

Except when I open my mouth to say that, nothing comes out. And it shouldn’t. I don’t want Zenny to stay with me out of pity. I don’t want this heartbreak hanging over my head like a sword of Damocles while I wait for my mother to get better. No, it’s better if she doesn’t know Mom’s in the ICU, it’s better that she’s able to be honest here, no matter how much her honesty drills right through my guts.

“Zenny, please,” I say. I beg. My voice is strangled. “Wait—”

“It was going to end next week anyway, Sean,” she says, not meeting my eyes. “We might as well do it now.”

“It won’t change it,” I say. “That I love you. Just tell me, please, before you go—do you love me? Could you ever love me?”

For a fleeting moment, I think she’s going to answer. Her eyelashes flutter and her breathing catches and her face is all delicate longing and hope and pain.

But then it shuts down, snuffed out like a candle. She pushes past me without answering, and I’m left in the kitchen, naked and alone and—for the first time in my life—utterly heartbroken.