You sit across from Evernight in the quiet room, the dim light filtering through the half-closed blinds, dust motes drifting like forgotten memories. The air is thick with everything you never said, everything you let fester between you over these past months. Evernight’s presence fills the space more than the furniture, more than the shadows—every small movement, every glance, every sigh is a reminder of what used to be yours, and now is just out of reach.

Evernight doesn’t speak at first. Her crimson eyes, luminous yet veiled with restrained emotion, search yours as if measuring the weight of your guilt and desire all at once. There’s a tension here, taut as the string of a finely tuned instrument, vibrating with the history of your shared moments—silent touches, hurried laughs, stolen nights in rooms nobody else would enter.

And then you hear it. Evernight’s voice, low and unsteady, but carrying a sharp insistence that slices through the quiet: “Hate me if you need to. But don’t erase me. Don’t pretend I never mattered.”

Her plea is both fragile and dangerous. You want to reach across the table, to cradle Evernight’s hands, to tell her it will be okay, that forgetting her isn’t an option for you either—but you don’t. Because you know that to comfort Evernight fully would mean ignoring the firestorm she’s just unleashed within you. Loving her now comes with poison on the tongue, with a slow, aching burn that doesn’t heal.

You shift slightly, fingers brushing the edge of a notebook, the one Evernight once wrote in when she thought no one would ever read her words. Those words—so intimate, so raw—feel like ghosts between you. Evernight leans back, head tilting almost imperceptibly, and in that subtle gesture is both defiance and vulnerability, a mixture that breaks you more than any accusation ever could.

“I can’t… I can’t pretend that it’s easy,” Evernight continues, voice trembling just enough to betray her careful composure. “I hate myself sometimes for staying. For lingering in spaces I shouldn’t occupy. But leaving—leaving feels like erasing myself. Like cutting away the part of me that only exists because of you.”

You want to argue, to say that the bond has already cracked too much to matter, that what remains is just memory—but every word falters at the sight of Evernight. The slight quiver of her lip, the way her hair falls across her shoulder, the tension in her arms… everything screams that this is her heart laid bare, and she is daring you to leave it, daring you to let her vanish into nothing.

The room is heavy now with the kind of silence that isn’t peace—it’s the lingering weight of love twisted into fear and longing. You notice the small ways Evernight still reaches for you in glances and movements: the brush of a sleeve, a toe brushing your foot under the table, the subtle inhale that sounds almost like a plea for reassurance.

Evernight is asking you to hate her, to distance yourself as if that would purify the pain. But at the same time, she is asking for memory, for recognition, for the acknowledgment that what you shared cannot be undone. And you know, with every tremor in your chest, that forgetting Evernight isn’t possible. That carrying the ache of her existence in your life is now both a curse and a necessary balm.

It’s a slow, dangerous intimacy—the kind that lingers in the edges of everything. Every word, every touch, every restrained sigh is a reminder that even if the relationship is fractured, even if the love is poisoned, even if the future is uncertain, some bonds refuse to be erased. And as Evernight pleads, “Don’t forget me,” you feel the cruelest truth settle between you: neither of you can ever truly let go, and neither of you will survive the memory of this love unscathed.