“You’re supposed to be my friend,” she says furiously, her voice low, crackling with intensity that usually compels him ever closer but now only lashes out at him, driving him back and away. “You’re my friend, and you threw…that…at me anyway!”
He swallows back his immediate retort (you are my friend, and yet you didn’t even give me a chance), his pleading explanation (Luthor is so dangerous, so deadly, and I couldn’t make you see it), his careful justification (I have been holding it back for so long that I decided to finally be brave and for once in my life fight instead of run), and says nothing at all. The truth is that he knows he shouldn’t have told her (knows she doesn’t love him), but he convinced himself that maybe she did feel more for him (she trusted him, after all, more than anyone else in her life, and that had to count for something), that maybe hearing he loved her would make her stop and see things differently. He’d told himself he was doing the brave thing, the right thing, and that even if it didn’t turn out the way he so desperately wanted, at least she’d know.
And even now, even after all the pain the last thirty-six hours have brought him, he can’t bring himself to apologize for letting her know she is loved. If she is waiting for an apology, or for him to take it back, then she will be waiting a long time.
