The Comments Begged Me to Believe He Loved Me, His Actions Had Already Convinced Me Otherwise Chapter 09

The Comments Begged Me to Believe He Loved Me, His Actions Had Already Convinced Me Otherwise Chapter 09

After that night, the comments never came back. I couldn’t peek behind Silas’s walls anymore — and I didn’t want to.

There was enough real love around me that his kind — the kind you had to decode — stopped mattering.

Stella, for one. Carefree about everything but me. She’d throw her arms around me when I was low and notice in a heartbeat when my silence meant something was wrong.

And then there was Nolan.

He probably thought he was subtle. But seven years of hunting for scraps of affection had made me very, very good at spotting the real thing. After the breakup, Nolan stopped pretending not to care.

And Chloe started running her mouth — telling anyone who’d listen that I’d been sleeping with my boss all along, that I’d dumped Silas for money, that I was the reason he’d fallen apart.

The art crowd turned on me. But Nolan shut it down — the few times they tried to cause trouble at the office, they couldn’t even get past the front desk.

Most of the noise never even reached me. Once we got to Apex Point Station, Nolan dropped the last of the act. After the day’s fieldwork was done, he’d always find his way to my side.

I decided to cut through it.

“You know dating me is going to be a mess, right? Forget the ex-boyfriend mess — the company doesn’t even allow office relationships.”

Nolan didn’t look up. He was chipping away at a chunk of ice with his utility knife, smiling like I hadn’t said a word. “So I’ll resign when we get back.”

“…That’s not funny.”

“I’m not joking, Elena. Don’t insult me by pretending I don’t mean it.”

I blinked. The ease of it caught me off guard — how simply he’d said it, like it cost him nothing.

“Since when are you this straightforward? No deflecting, no games — this isn’t the guy who outfoxes clients for a living.”

Nolan kept carving. A few more strokes, and he held out the finished piece — a crude little star, sculpted from ice.

“Because love has to be said out loud. Otherwise it just melts and leaves you with nothing but cold hands. Right?”

I pressed my lips together and took the star from his hand.

He was right.

Love was never supposed to be unspeakable. It wasn’t supposed to hide behind mind games, or disguise itself in coldness and cruelty. All that did was cut the person who loved you. And those cuts never fully healed.

I didn’t go looking for news about Silas. It found me anyway.

He’d spiraled for weeks before the professor dragged him back to the studio. But the work that came out of him was flat, lifeless — nothing like before. He started drinking. The numbness never lasted, and the crash afterward always hit harder.

The professor, worried sick, used his own sixtieth birthday as an excuse to get all his students together — hoping a good night might pull Silas back from the edge.

It backfired. The second Silas saw Chloe, something snapped. He swept everything off the table — plates, glasses, food, all of it crashing to the floor — and started screaming.

“Get out. All of you — GET OUT!”

A shard of porcelain clipped Chloe’s cheek. The professor rushed to shield her, but Silas turned on him too — jabbing a finger in his face.

“And YOU — why didn’t you tell me Elena left for Apex Point? What… what gives any of you the right to keep that from me…”

The professor’s face went purple. He fumbled for his heart medication, slipping a pill under his tongue, and threw Silas out of the studio.

“You ungrateful bastard!”

“You’re talented, Silas — God knows you are — and it kills me to say this. But I can’t help someone who won’t help themselves. I made a mistake taking you on, and as of today, you’re no longer my student.”

A colleague relayed the whole thing in theatrical detail over lunch. I smiled, but it was thin. Something in my chest stirred — not longing. Just the ghost of it.

The boy I’d once loved was becoming harder to remember. I shook it off and let him fade.

What I didn’t expect was Silas — standing in the arrivals crowd the day I landed back home.