Page 21 of Iridescent
A spark of anger flares in my chest. I turn to him. “Stop doing what? Hoping?”
He grimaces. “Stop torturing yourself.” A brittle edge cuts through his voice. “Por Dios, Yara—how many times do we have to go through this before you realize—” He shifts in his seat, then forces the words out. “It’s not going to change.”
A fist closes around my heart, tight enough to steal the next breath from me.
No.
He can’t mean those words.
“You don’t know that,” I snap.
Outside, the coast is a dark blur. Inside the car, everything is painfully clear: I’m hurt, and he’s hurt, and we’re tearing at each other because we don’t know what else to do.
“Maybe it will change,” I add. “Maybe IVF will finally work. Next month. Next year. Maybe one day, I’ll get pregnant.”
The word hangs between us.
His face twists, and I see the pain swirling in his eyes.
“You don’t listen,” he rasps. “You never listen. I told you, we can have a good life without—”
He stops, biting off the rest. But I already know how this ends.
"Without a child," I finish for him, spitting the words out. The truth of it, the idea of a childless life as a good life, tastes bitter. "Maybe you can live with that. But I—"
"You think I don't want a baby too?" He cuts me off. His eyes flash in the dimness, and suddenly the car feels very small. "You think I'm not grieving every single time you are?"
“Then why are you so ready to give up?” My voice trembles, and I hate it. “Why does it feel like I’m the only one still fighting for this? For us?”
The car races around a bend a little too fast, and he eases up on the gas with a curse.
His throat works, and when he answers, the rawness in his voice cuts through me.
“This isn’t easy for me.” He isn’t shouting. Not quite. But there is more force in his voice than I have heard in years. “Watching you wake up with hope in your eyes just to watch it get crushed again kills me. Watching you blame yourself. Hate yourself. Tear yourself apart because your body won’t do what you keep begging it to do.” He drags in an unsteady breath. “I can’t keep watching you disappear into this. You have no idea, Yara. No idea what I’m trying to save you from.”
The words pour out of him in a rush, hot and anguished. They hit their mark; I feel them like physical blows, because he's right. I don't know what he's been trying to save. Lately, I've been so consumed by my own pain that I never stopped to wonder how he was coping with his.
"What are you trying to save?" I ask, and it's not a challenge now, but a plea. "Tell me."
His hands tighten on the wheel. For a long moment, the only sound is our breathing and the steady drone of tires on pavement. Finally, he exhales, and the fight drains out of him. "I'm trying to saveyou," he croaks. "To save us."
My heart hitches. In the darkness, I can just make out his profile—the proud angle of his nose, the hard line of his jaw—and I see it tense as he continues, "I can't... I can't watch you destroy yourself over this, Yara. I am scared, terrorized, of what this is doing to you."
I open my mouth to respond, but he isn't finished.
“I’m terrified of losing you,” he admits. “I almost watched you die once, remember? I can’t do that again.”
A lump rises in my throat, threatening to choke me.
Of course I remember. How could I ever forget?
He had been there through all of it.
My coach filled in the pieces I had no memory of.
How Xavier vaulted the barricade the second I went down, climbing into the ring while everyone else was still frozen. How he dropped to his knees beside me, half-mad with panic, shouting my name. How he refused to move when the medics rushed in, hovering so close they had to physically drag him back to make room for the stretcher.
How he ran alongside them all the way to the ambulance, ignoring theconcrete, the broken grit, everything beneath his feet. How he stumbled more than once, but never slowed. Never stopped trying to keep up.
