He looks up at me, his blue eyes holding mine, and in them I see something I don't know how to name. Something raw. Something old.
"Because the only love I want…"
He stops. His jaw tightens.
"It belongs to someone else."
The words hang in the air between us, heavy and fragile, like glass I'm afraid to touch. I stare at him, frozen. The room is silent except for the soft beep of the monitors and the distant hum of the hospital's ventilation system. I don't know what to say. I don't know what answer he's looking for, or if he's looking for one at all.
He looks away first.
His gaze shifts to the side table, to the bag of soup Deniz brought, still sitting where we left it, the paper handle slightly crumpled.
"I'm hungry," he says.
I blink, following his gaze. The shift is sudden, deliberate—like a door closing on whatever vulnerability he just showed, like a curtain drawn across a window I wasn't meant to see through.
