It wasn’t love, it was need, and in the end it was going to burn them both.

He arrived at her door that night because he needed to forget, and she let him in because she needed to be necessary to someone. She woke in the morning to an empty bed and bruised wrists, and somehow the combined pain of those two things was nearly enough to drive away the other deeper injuries.

She drove to work that morning with shaking hands, and when she stepped into the lab and found him there she was afraid for a moment that there would be something awkward between them, that somehow they had ruined everything in the space of a few hours of desperation. But she didn’t see last night in his eyes. Instead, she saw Kate there, and in a strange way it made her feel better.

He hadn’t slept when he left her, she knew that from the bruised look in his eyes, and in her mind she saw him careening down the highway in the lonely darkness, headed west, or south, or anywhere that wasn’t here. Maybe he would have kept going if the thought of revenge hadn’t pulled him back, but here he was, and she knew that he wasn’t here because of her.

It didn’t hurt as much as it should have.

In fact, it didn’t hurt at all, and she found herself beginning to wonder if maybe she had forgotten what it was to feel. There was a numbness to her actions now, a practiced logic to her motions and words that made her feel like someone else had wrenched the wheel of her life out of her hands and pressed the gas hard, sending her spinning out of control behind a calm façade of efficiency.

Somehow her work got done, she didn’t really know how, because she couldn’t recall doing half of it, and late at night she would sit in the lab and wonder where the hours had gone, wonder if she was slowly losing her mind. Then she would feel him in the silence behind her, feel him and not hear him, because he was still good at hiding himself from her, and all thoughts of insanity would leave her, because he had become her stability.

It seemed that the nights with him were the only times when she felt alive anymore, the nights and then the cold dawning of morning when she would roll over and watch her curtains flutter in the breeze over the empty side of the bed beside her. Those were her constants now, the only things she could count on happening day after day, and as time passed, even the pain of his nightly disappearance became routine.

Every night he would leave her there, tangled in damp sheets that still smelled of him, and he would drive. He told her that one night, told her where he went when he left her, but she hadn’t needed him to tell her because she already knew. Each night he drove, and as dawn broke ahead of him or behind him or alongside him, he somehow found a reason to return.

She feared that someday there would no longer be a reason.

More than that, she feared that she would someday become the reason, and it scared her because this was not about love. It was raw need, and two people clinging desperately to something that didn’t make any sense to either of them. It had never been about love, and she was desperately afraid that one day when dawn broke it would be her that he thought of, and her that made him turn his car around.

One day, it would be about Kate anymore, it wouldn’t be about loss, or comfort, or escape. One day she would wake to find him still beside her, tangled in the same sheets and shivering in the breeze that swept over them from the open window. One day, she knew, it would only be about them, the two of them locked together in a desperate cycle of need.

But it had never been about love, and in the end, it was going to burn them both, one way or another.