Georgia
She opened the door and Axel was standing there.
The hallway light behind him was the same flat fluorescent that never fully turned off. For one disorienting second she registered only the ordinary details: the wrinkled shirt he’d slept in, or hadn’t, the two days of stubble past even his usual, the gray in his face.
For a long moment neither of them spoke. She saw that he already knew, not just that she was sick but the shape of it, the number, and something in her that had been braced for six weeks gave way at once.
“You decided for me,” Axel said.
“I wanted you to love me because you wanted to.”
“I did.”
“Not because I was dying.”
“I already did,” he said again, his voice rough in a way she had never heard from him. “Georgia, I loved you before any of this. That never — you didn’t get to decide I only loved you when it was easy.”
She looked away. “I spent twenty years watching a man stay in a marriage because leaving it felt like more trouble than staying did. I don’t know how to tell the difference anymore, Axel, between someone choosing me and someone just not getting around to leaving. I wasn’t going to do that to you. I wasn’t going to be the thing you didn’t leave.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“You don’t know that. Neither do I. By the time either of us found out, it’d be too late to take it back.”
“Then let it be too late.” He stepped closer, close enough now that she could see exactly how little he’d slept, how much this had cost him already, standing in her doorway. “You don’t get to protect me from loving you. That’s not — that’s just deciding my life for me. I’ve had enough of people doing that.”
She finally looked at him. “You don’t understand.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t understand how you could decide that I was better off without you. I’ve spent six weeks telling myself I was respecting your choice. I wasn’t. I was scared, and I let that look like respect, and I’m done doing that.”
Georgia began to cry.
Axel stepped closer still. “How long?”
“About six months,” she said, and heard how small the number sounded out loud.
He closed his eyes for a long moment.
Then he said the only thing he had left to offer. “Then give me six months.”
She stared at him. “Axel—”
“Give me the time. The time you were about to — I don’t care that it’s not what either of us planned. I don’t care if it ends badly. It was always going to end. Everybody’s does, we just usually get to pretend we don’t know when.” He stopped, and started again, quieter. “I’d rather have six months with my eyes open than fifty years telling myself there’s no rush.”
And this time Georgia did not decide for him.
She let him stay.
He did not try to hold her. He followed her inside, into the small, forgettable room, and sat on the edge of the bed beside her, close but not touching. It was Georgia who closed the distance. After a long, quiet minute she took his hand, rough and familiar and shaking slightly, and held it in both of hers.
Neither of them said anything else that night.