He knows the signs.

He’s seen them before, in past lovers, in friends, in soldiers long gone. Distance has a rhythm to it. A steady retreat. A tide pulling out to sea.

Price, for all his gruff warmth, for all his rare softness, has lived long enough to recognize when something is slipping through his hands. When you are slipping through his hands.

At first, he tries not to believe it. He tells himself you’re tired, distracted, that life has simply grown heavier and you’re carrying it in silence. He convinces himself the edge in your smile, the hollow in your laugh, the way your eyes glance past him instead of into him...that all of it is temporary.

But he knows better. God help him, he does.

Once upon a time, you looked at him like he was the safest place in the world. Like the lines on his face weren’t age but history. Like his voice could anchor you through any storm. Now, your eyes slide off him like water. Your laughter, when it comes, feels rehearsed. Your hand, once so instinctively twined with his, now rests politely at your side.

Price doesn’t chase.

Not anymore. He’s too proud, too scarred, too tired to beg for what should come freely. So he just… watches. Lets the realization settle in his bones like winter frost. He smokes more. Stares at the embers curling in the ashtray, wondering if that’s what’s happening to you: burning out, leaving nothing but smoke and memory behind.

But oh, at night.

That’s when the ache sharpens. When you’re turned away from him in bed, your back a quiet rejection, and he lies there with his hand hovering inches from your skin. Wanting. Not daring. Because if he touches you and you don’t lean back into him, if you flinch, if you turn away...then he’ll know for certain; and he can’t bear that confirmation. Not yet.

So instead he lies still, staring into the dark, rehearsing goodbyes he’ll never say aloud. Better to lose you gently, he tells himself, than to hold you so tight you finally break away.

Yet… he’s still human. Still yours, in every way that matters. So when you brush past him in the kitchen, when your hand grazes his by accident, when your head tilts onto his shoulder during a rare moment of weakness: he soaks it in like a dying man savoring his last breath. He holds on to those fragments, those fleeting reminders that maybe...just maybe...you’re still his, somewhere under all that distance.

He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t demand. He just carries it. Because Price has always been a man of endurance. He knows how to suffer in silence. He knows how to shoulder what others cannot and if loving you now means loving you alone, quietly, from the margins of your memory...then that’s what he’ll do.

In the end, he never expected to keep you forever. Men like him don’t get forever. Men like him get moments: sweet, fleeting moments that taste like sunlight after too many years in the dark.

If that’s all he gets, he’ll take it. He’ll take every scrap of you he can, even as the tide pulls you away; because he’d rather drown with your name on his lips than live in a world where he never knew the warmth of being loved by you.