When she responds at last, her voice is carefully measured, all traces of affectionate warmth shuttered away behind an inscrutable mask. "Don't worry about it, Sam. They're... aware of our situation, you could say."

Despite the studied neutrality of her tone, there's an undercurrent of tension there that sets my nerves jangling in that preternatural, ineffable way once again. Like emotional tripwires fanning out in every direction, attuned to the slightest hint of discordance.

Swallowing hard, I shift in her arms to better study her expression. But she keeps her features angled away, pointedly avoiding my probing gaze as a pall of uneasy silence settles between us.

"O-Okay..." I finally manage, my mouth suddenly dry as a bone. The urge to pursue this newfound disquiet is a physical itch beneath my skin, burning and insistent. But warring against it is the far more habitual impulse to brush these kinds of nagging doubts aside, to cling to the fiction of okayness for as long as humanly possible.

Jamila doesn't give me a chance to decide one way or another. With a brusque shift, she disengages from our embrace and rolls onto her back, slipping free of the tangle of sheets and blankets to sit upright. I blink up at her, suddenly chilled by the loss of her warmth.

"We should get some sleep," she declares, her tone clipped and businesslike in a way that feels utterly alien coming from her. When she finally does meet my gaze, her expression is unreadable, her wonderful kaleidoscope irises now flat and opaque as smoky quartz.

She holds my gaze for a beat too long, wordlessly inscrutable. Then she twists away, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed as she reaches for the hem of her sleep shirt.

"I'll change in the bathroom," she murmurs, her voice little more than a hoarse rasp in the gloom. "Make yourself comfortable."

And just like that, she's up and moving, slipping from the room with an eerie, gliding silence. The door clicks shut behind her with a sort of hushed finality, leaving me alone amidst the rumpled bedding with nothing but the thunderous cadence of my own bewildered thoughts for company.

I tell myself she's just tired, worn thin by the tumult and relentless pressures of late. That whatever fleeting tension now hangs between us like a suffocating fog is merely the product of our battered psyches crying out for respite, no more significant than that. But even then, a faint rebuttal gnaws at the back of my consciousness. A soft, persistent keening that something deeper is happening here, some looming sea change I've willfully blinded myself to until now.

The silence that descends after Jamila's abrupt departure is suffocating, a yawning void that seems to swallow every scrap of oxygen in the room. I lie there in the gloom, unmoving, scarcely daring to breathe as the weight of that portentous stillness bears down on me like a physical force.

Then, at last, the rasp of the bathroom door opening cuts through the tense hush like a eulogy bell toll. I tense instinctively, every nerve ending afire with anticipation as Jamila's measured footsteps draw nearer, nearer--

The door creaks open once more and there she is, a silhouette framed by the dim glow spilling in from the hall beyond. For a handful of suspended heartbeats, she simply stands there unmoving, inscrutable. Then she steps fully into the room, pulls the door shut behind her with a note of finality that makes my breath catch in my throat.

She doesn't look at me at first, her attention seemingly elsewhere as she moves with the slow, almost ritualistic precision of an automaton. Situating herself on the edge of the mattress, palms braced against her knees, shoulders squared - it's the same drill I've seen athletes and fighters adopt when they're preparing themselves for something big.

Jamila takes a deep, steadying breath, lets it out in a shuddery exhalation. Then, finally, she turns to face me. Even in the low light, I can make out the taut lines of strain etched into her features, the knot of consternation pinching her brow.

"Sam, I... there's something I need to say," she begins, her voice low but clear, devoid of its usual warmth and affection. "Something I've been... grappling with for a while now, I suppose."

It hits me then, a sudden electric tingle prickling across my scalp and down my spine. That ineffable, inexplicable sense of dread from before, now metastasized into a full-blown pit of cold, yawning apprehension blossoming in my stomach.

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My first instinct is to stop her, to beg her not to say whatever it is she's steeling herself to unleash. Because deep down, in that primal burrow of my subconscious where human intuition still reigns supreme, I know - I know exactly where this is headed, can sense the looming shape on the horizon.

But the words shrivel on my tongue before I can give them voice. I can only lie there, frozen in place, as Jamila closes her eyes and powers on with obvious, grim determination.

"You know how much I care about you, right Sam?" Her eyes find mine in the gloom, glittering with some ineffable emotion that cleaves at my pounding heart. "How special our relationship is to me, maybe even... sacred in a way?"

Mutely, numbly, I nod. It's the only thing I can manage through the steadily rising tide of emotion rapidly swamping me on all sides - fear, confusion, trepidation. Whatever tumblers are steadily spinning into alignment, they're doing so in the shadowed chambers of Jamila's unfathomable depths. All I can do is wait for the final, rattling click that will leave me changed in some fundamental way.

For the first time since we've known each other, Jamila's liquid brown gaze skitters away from mine like a startled animal, unable or unwilling to meet the intensity of my regard. A muscle works in her jaw, a taut cord of tension that betrays just how profoundly whatever's roiling inside her has managed to shake those normally unshakable foundations.

"I...God, Sam, I..." She falters, the veneer of composure splintering even further as she grapples with whatever emotional leviathan lurks within, slowly dragging her beneath its inky depths.

Despite myself, despite the tooth-gnashing anxiety currently clawing at me from the inside out, I feel an almost overwhelming urge to comfort her, to gather her into my arms and shield her from the raging torrent ripping her asunder. Because that's what Jamila Fayad has always been to me - not just my lover but my protector, my haven against the darkness when it encroaches too close.

But something stays my hand. Some preternatural ward plucked from the deepest filigree of my subconscious, screaming at me to maintain my stillness, to weather this onslaught until its purpose is made clear. So I hold myself rigid, fingernails digging convulsively into my palms until I can feel the sting of broken skin, and wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Then--

"I can't do this anymore, Sam."

The words hit me with the force of a physical blow, a cataclysmic shockwave that rips the very foundation from beneath me. Everything I thought I knew, every certainty and conviction I'd clung to as my bedrock in these churning seas of misery, crumbles into so much gravel in the wake of those eight baleful syllables.

My world spins, endlessly spiraling down into infinite blackness as shock crests into visceral, gut-punching agony. I open my mouth to speak, to howl my anguish to the uncaring heavens, but only a pitiful croak emerges. Besides, I can't wake anyone up right now. That wouldn't be fair to her family.

Jamila isn't looking at me - can't look at me. Her head is bowed, hands clenched into tense knots between her knees, framed locks of dark hair hanging in wild disarray around her pinched features. Her shoulders rise and fall in time with the measured cadence of her breathing, a contrast to the maelstrom of quaking loss and ruination raging through me.

"I'm... I'm so sorry, Sam," she whispers, the words quavering and indistinct, like transmissions beamed from some far-flung, alien reality. "Please know that this has nothing to do with how I feel about you as a person. You're one of the most incredible, admirable human beings I've ever known, and you'll always have a sacred place in my heart."

Her eyes flick up, catching mine for one fleeting, visceral instant. They shimmer with an ocean of pain and loss, a veritable wellspring of grief she's only barely managing to hold back by sheer force of will.

"But... but as for us, as more than just friends... I can't, Sam," she rasps, the words catching like barbs in her throat. "I've tried, God knows I've tried to make it work, but in the end... I can't keep lying to myself. There's just so much. I mean. Like... I'm not... Attracted to girls. Or boys. Or maybe anyone. And it doesn't feel fair to you that I don't think we could ever have, like... a sexual relationship. I mean,"

The lead weight in my chest congeals into an icy, stabbing crystal, driving itself deeper and deeper into my core with every juddering syllable. I want to lash out, to rage and rant against these truths she's so dispassionately firing off like shrapnel ripping into me, like a grenade. I want to yell at her. I want to start screaming. But I don't. Because that's not a good thing to do. She trails off.

But even as the impulse surges, a more primal part of me understands the truth underpinning Jamila's words. That flicker in her eyes, the ragged edge of muted anguish scraping at the edges of her voice -- this isn't some petulant flight of fancy or fleeting impulse she's given in to. This is a deep, elemental need, a hunger clawing at the very sinews of her being. As inexorable as the turn of the tides, as immutable as the cycle of the seasons.

"You know? Like... I don't mind holding your hand. And cuddling with you. And kissing you. But I think that's... that it's something you want more than something I want. And at this point there's... for me, it... I mean... What's separating us from 'good friends'?" She asks, and I want to say 'we make out sometimes', but it doesn't come out.

Some shred of rational thought manages to assert itself amidst the whirlwind of emotion tearing me asunder. I know what's coming, even before the words form on Jamila's lips. My throat tightens as I brace myself for the blow, the coup de grace that will rend what's left of my world into glittering shards of ruin.