A/N: Just a whisper of a scene. Tell me what you think.

"Why did you leave, Jess?"

He blinked rapidly, looking into the distance. "Because I couldn't stay."

Her lips tightened so they wouldn't tremble and her eyes slipped away, tracing the ground. Softly and stiffly: "That's it?"

He nodded with a steady rhythm, feeling his breath stuck like a wishbone lodged in his throat. It made his words come out whispered hoarsely and slow. "If I was ever gonna come back, I couldn't stay. If I was ever going to be any good for anybody - myself even, I couldn't stay." He clenched his teeth briefly. "If there was going to be 'us' ever…I couldn't stay."

He was looking at her intensely, but she didn't look up.

"What does that mean?" The sound…tincture of roses and lavender and violets. Her words. Her voice. Petals of orange blossoms. The delicate lids of her eyes.

He chewed on the apex of his upper lip and worried the furrows of his eyebrows, just for a second.

"It means I needed to fix…me."

Her arms shrugged around herself as if she needed a sweater for this conversation. "And you couldn't have told me that?"

"No."

He could see the bitter taste in her mouth.

"You wouldn't have let me." His thumb and forefinger rubbed at the seams of his belt loop. "You would have tried to do the fixing. And, it would have unraveled everything you were trying to do." His jaws flexed between sentences. "You would've let me wreck you." Vertical ridges appeared on his smooth forehead along with raised eyebrows and an expression of pained hope that made his voice crack. "I had to go." His eyes cast their nets out into the street again with the shaken head and the half raised shoulders. "And no matter how many times I called, there were no words to tell you that."

Her eyes turned upward, and the smile that curled only the outlying tips of the line of her mouth - it was full of tears, and it killed him. The whole thing still killed him. All these years later.

"I'm sorry."

She sobbed a laugh. No teardrops. Just a laugh that was chipped and cracked. And a barely there sigh. And words with the softness of a flickering candle.

"I would have liked to hear that."

His head dropped and his heart with it.

"Too late?"