Chapter 108: Feeling the Missing Core Anchor

Chapter 108: Chapter 108: Feeling the Missing Core Anchor

Gianna’s shoulders moved with a breath that shuddered once before she forced it even.

"I need you to stop selling me the future while I am still looking at the recording," she said.

"I need you to stop using how much you want me as the answer to a wound she deliberately handed me. Wanting me does not make the image disappear. It does not make my core sit quieter. It does not make me less afraid that the next time your class gets loud, the person who ends up absorbing the cost will be me again while she calls it data."

My hand slid down the door an inch. I did not step back. I also didn’t reach for her.

"What do you need," I asked, "that isn’t me arguing?"

Gianna was silent long enough that the system edged in again, then thought better of producing text.

"If you train with her, I cannot stop you; this world does not give me that right, and I’m not going to pretend it does. But I’m not standing in a bracket beside her until I decide whether I can look at you without seeing that video on a loop."

"And after the week?"

"After the week, I will tell you whether there is still a place beside me that includes the academy, or only a place that includes distance."

Her voice stayed steady by force.

"That is the boundary. It is conditional, and it is painful, and it is the best I can offer without becoming someone who either pretends she isn’t hurt or burns down every remaining thread out of pride."

My throat felt tight.

"I can hold that."

"Can you?"

Gianna asked, soft and sharp at once.

"Because holding it means you do not get to chase me down tonight with better words. It means you deal with the person who sent the file without using me as the emotional cleaning cloth afterward. It means if you kiss her again before I contact you, you do it without the illusion that my silence is temporary permission."

"I will kiss her more."

Gianna held my eyes for another second, searching for the flinch, the justification, the slide back into defense.

"I know it."

When she didn’t find it, something in her expression cracked, not into softness, but into the exhausted honesty of someone who had preferred a fight to this kind of clean, ugly agreement.

"Move," she said again.

This time I did.

Then my hand closed around her wrist before she could fully pass.

Gianna stopped hard.

For a second she tried to pull free on reflex.

I didn’t tighten enough to trap her. I only held enough that leaving would require an active choice instead of momentum.

That was when the first tear hit my knuckles.

Warm. Single. Then another.

"Please."

Her voice cracked in a way I had not heard from her before, not in training, not in the car, not even the night everything went wrong.

"Let me go. It’s so hard. I feel so stupid asking for anything exclusive in a world like ours, Revien."

The sound of it landed deeper than the old core-hunger ever had.

That had been appetite and panic and class design.

This was a woman cutting herself on the shape of what she needed and hating that she needed it.

Is this love?

The question rose uninvited and refused to leave.

"...Gia."

My own voice came out rough.

"I can’t feel your essence."

Her trembling slowed.

She turned her head, eyes half-full, confusion cutting through the tears.

"What are you talking about?"

"That day you set yourself in me. Primary. An anchor I could feel even when I didn’t have permission to reach for it. The night we had sex, when everything went wrong, it disappeared. I have not been able to feel it since. Not muted. Not distant. Gone."

Gianna let out a sound that wanted to be a laugh and failed. She looked at me like I had offered her a knife and called it comfort.

"Isn’t that nice?" she said.

"Now you can fill it with anyone you want. Including Rei."

"I want you to be my primary anchor."

The words left plain.

Her face twisted.

"Stop."

"I’m not saying it to pull you back through the door with a romantic technicality."

My thumb rested against the inside of her wrist, over the fast point of her pulse.

"I’m saying it because the space has been sitting there the whole week, and every time the system tried to treat other people as efficient replacements, it only made the absence clearer. I don’t want the slot filled by convenience. I want what you put there before I broke the night."

"You don’t get to want that like it is a simple request."

Tears tracked down her face without her permission now.

She hated it.

I could see the hate as clearly as the hurt.

"You do not get to stand here after that video and ask me to climb back into a core that locked up on top of me and went empty-eyed while I had to throw you off. Primary anchor is not a pet name, Revien. It is a channel. It is access. It is me agreeing to remain the first point your class leans on when it gets hungry."

"I know what it is."

"Do you?"

She pulled at her wrist once more, not hard enough to break free, hard enough to show she still could.

"Because from this side it looks like you want the comfort of my priority while keeping the freedom to let Rei put her mouth on you and call it training. And maybe that is what this world requires. Maybe I am the stupid one for standing in a hallway crying over exclusivity like a child who did not read the contract. But I cannot smile and sign that version tonight."

My chest felt too tight for clean breathing.

"I would rather have the weight of you there, complicated, conditional, furious, than the clean efficiency of an empty slot."

Gianna’s eyes squeezed shut.

Another tear slipped free.

"You are making this so much harder."

"I know."

"If I walk out of here and you go fill that silence with her—"

"I asked for you."

My hand loosened enough that the choice was fully hers again.

"If you leave it empty, that is your right. If you put it back, that is also your right. I’m not that desperate."

When she finally spoke again, the anger had thinned into something more exhausted and more dangerous.

"I cannot be your primary anything right now."

My hand opened.

Her wrist left my fingers.

She walked.

I stood in the doorway and listened to her footsteps move down the corridor, slow, controlled, each one a refusal to run.

They faded toward the elevators.

The building settled into ordinary residential quiet.

I didn’t follow behind.

One minute.

Five.

Ten.

Fifteen.

Then footsteps returned, faster, less composed.

The door opened from the other side, hard enough to startle the air.