[BL] Bound to My Enemy: The Billionaire Who Took My Girl-Chapter 210: Unwanted

CASSIAN

The weight of him against my chest was the only thing that felt real.

Noah’s frame was smaller than it should have been, sharp angles and bird-like bones that felt far too fragile for the world he was forced to inhabit.

His sobbing wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t loud. It was the quiet, rhythmic shaking of a man who had been holding his breath for twenty years and had finally found a pocket of oxygen.

It was the sound of a structural collapse, years of architectural pretense finally giving way to the gravity of the truth.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I kept one hand at the back of his head, my fingers tangled in the soft mess of his hair, while my other hand splayed across his back.

I held him with the specific, focused intensity of someone trying to keep a shattered object from falling further apart. I wasn’t restraining him; I was simply providing a boundary. The gesture was enough, even if my tongue couldn’t find the words.

In my chest, a heaviness arrived that I hadn’t invited. It was a cold, leaden recognition. I knew this architecture. I knew the blueprint of the corner he’d hidden in, the specific vibration of a dinner table where your own blood treats you like a virus, and the way the air thins until you’re apologizing just for the space your lungs occupy. I had felt all of it. Different rooms, different names on the mail, but the same design of being unwanted in the one place you were supposed to be safe.

I didn’t say any of this. I just stood there in the middle of a park that didn’t care, holding a man who had finally stopped pretending, while the city moved around us with its habitual, noisy indifference.

When Noah finally settled, the transition was abrupt. The crying tapered into a ragged, exhausted silence. He pulled back just enough to breathe, his forehead still resting against my shoulder, his hands clutching my lapels as if he’d forgotten how to let go.

"Do you want to leave?" I asked. My voice was flat, stripped of the corporate artifice I usually wore like armor. There was no performance in it.

He nodded, still refusing to look at me. "Yeah."

I stood first, then reached down to help him up. Neither of us commented on the wetness on my shirt or the way his eyes were rimmed with raw, painful red. We walked out of the park without looking back at the lights or the crowd. The carnival was behind us; the reality was waiting.

The villa was a different kind of quiet. The air was contained, filtered, and smelled faintly of the expensive wood polish Miss Chen used. The shift from the chaotic outside to the controlled inside was almost physical.

Miss Chen was waiting. She read Noah’s face the moment we crossed the threshold, the way she always read things. She didn’t ask if he was alright. She didn’t ask what had happened. She had been taking care of broken people long enough to know that questions were just more weight to carry.

"Your show is on," she said to Noah. Direct. Practical.

"Oh," Noah whispered, a small, startled sound.

"Sit, Dear" she said, already moving toward the kitchen. "I’ll bring the tea."

The small kindness of it hit him visibly. I watched the tension in his jaw flicker and then soften.

She was offering him normalcy, a tether to a world where his only responsibility was to watch a television screen and drink tea. It was exactly what he needed, and I felt a brief, sharp flash of gratitude toward her that I would never voice. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

We settled onto the sofa. The telenovela was already playing, the volume low enough to be a background hum of dramatic Spanish dialogue.

We sat with an awkward distance between us—the specific, jarring gap that occurs when two people have shared a profound intimacy in the dark and are now forced to reconcile it under the steady glow of a living room lamp.

I watched him out of the corner of my eye. Noah’s gaze kept darting down to my legs, crossed at the knee, before snapping back to the television. He did it once. Twice. The third time, I decided to end the debate.

"Do you want to put your head on my lap?" I asked, my tone conversational, as if I were offering him a glass of water.

"No," he said immediately. He didn’t look at me.

"Then why do you keep staring at my thighs?"

"I’m not staring at your—I was looking at the..." He gestured vaguely toward the television, which was nowhere near my lap. The defense had no structural integrity. "I wasn’t staring."

I didn’t argue. I simply uncrossed my legs and reached over. I put my hand on the back of his head and guided him down.

"I said I didn’t—" he started, but he was already horizontal. He let out a huff of indignation that sounded more like a sigh of relief. "You never listen."

"Take advantage of tonight," I said, leaning back and looking at the television. "I’m in the mood to be generous."

"I don’t need your generosity," he muttered, though he made no move to get up. "I’m getting up in a second."

I pressed my hand lightly on the top of his head. "You’re not."

"You’re so—"

"Stubborn. Yes."

"I was going to say insufferable."

I made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh, but it was close. "Stubbornness is a survival skill, Noah. It keeps you intact in situations designed to take you apart."

The words felt heavier than I’d intended. I became aware that I’d said them, then I chose to move past them.

My hand stayed in his hair. I hadn’t consciously decided to leave it there, but once it was, I found the texture of it distracting. It was short, wavy, and softer than it had any right to be.

The kind of soft that made you want to keep checking, just to be sure. My fingers moved through the strands, following the natural waves, tracing the place where the hair ended and the skin of his neck began.

"You’re doing that on purpose," he whispered.

"Doing what?"

"That. The... stop."

"Ignore it."

"How am I supposed to ignore—" He stopped. He sighed—the sound of a man who had decided the battle wasn’t worth the cost of the peace. He went quiet, his eyes fixing on the screen.

I continued. I watched the show without actually seeing it. My fingers tracked the warmth of his scalp, and I felt the tension slowly, agonizingly leave his shoulders. Miss Chen brought the tea, set it down without a word, and vanished. The large and spacious living room felt like an island.