“You don’t have to be sorry Sharon, not to me, not to any me, and you have nothing to be sorry for at all. I can understand tired right now.” And he could, did, and probably would understand it all the more in the coming days. “And what you’re talking about here doesn’t seem like a small thing…” His voice trailed for the first time while the thought of what he was going to say got stuck somewhere behind his teeth. He didn’t want to say it, but wasn’t that the whole point he was trying to make right now? “Listen, it doesn’t seem like we’re going anywhere anytime soon. If you’re tired, if you want to table this and come back to it when you’re more rested, that’s an option.” Because yes, there was a lot going on, a lot both of them could say, but he was well aware of how bad a talk could go if you tried to have it at the long time.
“Just let me know what you need.”
There he went. Sometimes Steve was… sometimes Steve was too much like himself. There was an instinctual response hidden inside of Sharon that wanted to tell Steve to go screw himself. How he could he, how dare he sit here and be like… that. This was her, not some crowd. How dare he just… nothing was okay and part of Sharon was wholly irrational in the thought that it couldn’t be made okay, but he was here and it was a bit like staring down the barrel of a gun for her. She’d not fully realized how much she’d just let go, let him know, until he’d started telling her he could never hate her. How he couldn’t think that way about her and it just played on repeat in her mind. The same thought that had plagued her for months, the same one she knew was going to keep her up at night here, the same one that had been keeping her up tonight before he’d shown up. Before he’d…
She couldn’t fix this.
Sharon desperately wanted the other part of her mind to win over. She wanted desperately, even if it was because she was exhausted and 6 shades of vulnerable at the moment, to just accept exactly what he was saying. Accept that it was fact, it was truth, and just… she didn’t know what. Nails dug into her shoulder briefly, a bad habit she doubted she was ever going to lose at this point. He had no idea what she’d done and he was still sitting here being… damn him. He was being himself. Part of her maybe had wanted that look because it would justify months of holding this in, prove that she’d somehow been… it didn’t matter… it didn’t matter because like usual, there he was putting himself out there come hell or high water. Sharon had always loved and hated that about him. That damn martyr complex.
It had always been beautiful, yet terrifying to her. She’d always thought that was what would lose him for her, not…
A slender hand moved away from her shoulder, light indents from where she’d grasped at it a little too hard visible along the top of it - a tell tale indent from her thumb just near enough to her collar bone and scar to almost look a part of it. Pushing her hand up and through her hair she closed her eyes, huffing in a way that was just shy of amused. “I hate you.” She said, but there wasn’t a drop of anger or malice or any other negative emotion in the way she said it. In fact, for the look on her face, for her body language… it was almost shockingly playful in tone and Sharon herself wasn’t sure where the ability to say it had come from. Her natural reaction to him was still a light joke, a little tease.
She wasn’t sure how she’d pulled it off, how it’d managed to leave her lips - but it had.
Every word was taken in, every little move - that outstretched hand, the way he straightened himself up. Damn him for being exactly him. She wasn’t sure what she’d really been expecting… even when he’d…. even…
Even when Steve had walked out of their apartment, not spoken to her again… he’d never said he hated her. Hell, he’d never even actually broken up with her if you really want to get down to technicalities but… she’d stopped wearing her ring after a while. It wasn’t an effort to move on, it wasn’t even an effort to try and trick herself into any certain emotion… she’d just felt like… actually, she didn’t know.