Please Forget Me - Chapter 264

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾.

‘This necklace around my neck right now—it originally belonged to my mother.’

So the words I’d spoken weren’t truly mine at all. They had been hers.

“Dana, if you open this, you’ll see the person Mom loves the most.”

When I opened the locket, my own face was reflected in the mirror. As I smiled proudly, my mother removed the necklace and placed it around my neck.

“Dana, never forget this. Mom will love you forever.”

She told me to open it whenever I doubted whether she loved me.

In the end, I couldn’t resist the warmth of her embrace and fell asleep in her arms. When I woke the next morning, my mother was gone.

Gone everywhere.

She had left the house. Left me. And she never came back.

‘It was a perfect day.’

How had I failed to see the danger hidden beneath that manufactured perfection?

There was no reason for a woman who could barely smile to suddenly smile so brightly all day.

And that man, too—there was no way he should be smiling like this now. And yet he looked nothing but happy.

This is the end.

I’m never going to see him again.

“I don’t want to eat.”

I dropped my fork and knife as if throwing them away. Tears splashed onto the plate of beautifully prepared food.

“Dana… why are you crying?”

“I’m not a clueless child anymore.”

“……”

“You think I wouldn’t notice you’re trying to abandon me?”

“Dana…”

“Please. Don’t leave me.”

If I could go back to that day, I would say those words to my mother. It wasn’t too late to say them to Killian, but that didn’t mean the knot in my chest simply dissolved.

“I’m not abandoning you. How could I ever abandon you?”

Killian tried every possible word to soothe me, but—

“Then promise me you won’t leave.”

“……”

He refused to make the one promise that mattered most.

“Hic….”

I must have believed that once I became an adult, I’d learn how to keep people from leaving. But faced with the same situation again, I simply reverted to the child I’d been back then—just bigger now.

All I could do was cling. The realization felt like betrayal.

Now I understood why Killian had been drinking instead of thinking, why he’d looked so lost. I drank, too. Killian watched me with the same hollow eyes and silently raised his glass.

“We swore we’d never be separated—hic—are you breaking it already? I won’t let go. Even if I die.”

When I started clinging to him drunkenly, Killian took me out of the restaurant. He headed straight back to our inn room.

‘He’s going to put me to bed and leave.’

The thought that I’d wake up alone—my father, whose face I couldn’t even remember, coming to take me away—made my heart drop.

“Dana—mmph…”

Terrified, I pressed my lips to Killian’s, silencing him before he could speak. I leaned into him with my full weight, and as drunk as I was, he was just as unsteady.

Staggering backward under my forceful kiss, he finally hit the bed. As he collapsed onto the mattress, I climbed onto his waist.

“I want a baby. No—maybe I already have one.”

If I was carrying his child, he wouldn’t be able to leave me. He was a man with too strong a sense of responsibility for that.

So this is what drinking like an adult does, it finally makes you think like one. I’d found his weakness. Something to bind him.

As I fumbled with his belt and buttons, nearly tearing them open, Killian grabbed my wrist.

“Dana, stop. I need to say something.”

“I don’t want to hear it!”

“Dana, I don’t want this. Please, stop.”

We were both resolved, but his resolve couldn’t defeat mine. The resolve to leave had one flaw, the resolve to cling did not.

Hesitation.

“Ungh…”

And because of that hesitation, Killian lost. At some point, he stopped trying to push me away as I buried my face between his legs. Still, it didn’t feel like he had truly surrendered.

“Mm… ngh…”

I desperately sucked at flesh that hadn’t even hardened. Above me, I heard a long, exhausted sigh.

Usually, just my touch was enough to make him swell and grow rigid. But today, no matter how hard I tried, there was no response at all—as though both his body and heart had already closed themselves tightly against me.