Soft Damage

This chapter includes scene depicting physical violence. If you are sensitive to this type of content, please proceed with caution.

My jaw aches anyway.

“Adrien?”

The driver says my French name with a clipped German edge. It sounds wrong. But I don’t care.

I just nod because my mouth won’t move. Speaking would mean explaining, and there’s no language for this kind of violence.

He glances at me through the mirror, and that contact feels like an intrusion. He’s already seen the destination glowing on his dashboard.

I tilt my head toward the window in an attempt to hide what’s left of me.

His brow twitches in the corner of my eyes, but he keeps silent.

Rocco De Santis had punched me straight in the face.

My Italian boyfriend.

Or what’s left of him, too.

I keep replaying it. The crack. The shock. As if repetition could somehow make sense.

I didn’t think endings could bleed like this. No one ever told me that heartbreak isn’t confined to the heart. It seeps downward, spreading through your body until your stomach twists against itself, and your breath scrapes like thorns. The pain isn’t just emotional. It throbs deep and unrelenting. Draining whatever strength I have left.

I feel powerless and small, like something inside me has caved in. Fear lingers at the edges of my thoughts. I don’t know who I am without him. It’s like wandering through a city that used to be home and realizing every street has changed its name.

I’d moved to Berlin last winter, following Rocco’s work contract, thinking love could survive in a new country.

Outside, the view is colorless—a smear of gray sky and rain on glass. The kind of rain that never quite falls. I took an Uber because I couldn’t trust myself behind a wheel. My hands are still trembling, still remembering the way he touched me before he destroyed everything. I’d rather not see our car parked by the curb, the one that smells like his cigarettes and bergamot soap.

The driver’s fingers drum against the steering wheel—hesitation disguised as rhythm. The air between us thickens with things neither of us will say.

The city passes like a film playing too fast. There are puddles, graffiti, and umbrellas collapsing in the wind. Every face reflected on the window looks foreign, including mine.

My phone vibrates again. It’s a message from Mara. She’s the only one who knows the whole story. She was Rocco’s last girlfriend. I’d asked her, over a bottle of wine in Paris, why they ended. She’d given me a sad, distant smile and said, “He has demons, Adrien. Just don’t let them become yours.” I thought she was being poetic. I never thought she was giving me a manual I’d need to use.

I mean, they’d broken up two years before I met him but somehow stayed friends. She lives in France, but distance isn’t a thing for us. We still find each other once a week. Even if it’s just a word or a voice note, she’s a small reminder that someone out there remembers who I am when I forget.

Did you sleep at all?

I stare at the text for too long. My reflection blinks. I see a pale guy with a split, swollen lip and a bruised cheek. His eyes don’t quite belong to someone alive.

I type slowly:

I Didn’t. Don’t think I will. He’s at the flat.

It had been an hour since I left the apartment.

I must’ve stood behind the building door for thirty minutes, pressing a cloth against my lips to stop the bleeding.

Three dots appear, vanish, and come back.

Adrien, please. Tell me where you are.

I’m calling Henri if you don’t answer.

Don’t do this alone.

My brother stared Rocco directly in the eyes across the wreckage of the Christmas dinner he caused. “You put your hands on him again,” he’d said, “and I will forget I ever considered you a friend.” It wasn’t a request. It was a threat.

Calling Henri would not only mean concern; it would also mean escalation, with consequences that could be nuclear. The mere thought of Henri’s voice, laced with that knowing, protective disappointment, felt worse than any hospital visit.

No. I can’t face him. Not yet. I need to breathe first.

You stopped responding tonight. What happened this morning?

The car jolts over the rails. My stomach lurches. I stare at the message until it feels like they’re addressed to someone else.

My destination isn’t far now. The car turns near Hackescher Markt. Wet cobblestones shimmer like spilled mercury. The smell of roasted chestnuts from a stand cuts through the rain. Somewhere, a tram bell echoes. The city is awakening. And it feels indifferent.

There’s still a faint trace of his cologne, and I can’t scrub it away.

He used to fix everything with silence: the radiator, the cracked shelf, me. Sometimes, it was with sex. Every act of care was another patch over a fracture he refused to see.

The way he said, “I’m sorry.” His tone was flat and almost practiced. Not even sorrowful anymore, just tired. I’m tired too. Tired of believing that this time would be different, that five years of loving him could fix what had collapsed.

I keep seeing it play out. The way I’d stood there, barefoot in the kitchen, while the drops hit the balcony railing like applause for a scene I didn’t want to be in. When I touched my mouth, my fingers came back red. My blood. My shirt’s collar was stained.

He sank to the floor, and his hands gripped his head as if he could keep himself together.

“Don’t go,” he said, voice splintering.

Then the sobs came out. Broken, the kind that tears through my heart. I’d never seen him cry before. Not like that. Not the man who always carried his pride like armor, his pain locked behind his teeth.

I wanted to hold him. God, I did. But I couldn’t anymore. Mercy can be another form of captivity.

So I turned away. Because for the first time in years, I realized I needed to save myself before I could save him.

My chest felt hollow. It was burning.

And I left, afraid of what he might do next and of what he’d already done to me.

Behind the door, his sobs dimmed. The kind of sound that will follow me long after Berlin forgets my name.

I press my forehead to the window’s cold glass. My reflection looks fragile. My hair’s a tangled mess; my eyes shine with the kind of tears that don’t quite fall. I pull my jacket tighter around me, trying to cover the dried blood stains.

I want to forgive him. If only to quiet the pain, to make it stop echoing in my legs, in my arms, in every corner of me. Part of me longs to believe it wasn’t his fault, or mine, or anyone’s. But even as I think it, I know how foolish it sounds.

I close my eyes, and for a second, I pretend the cold against my forehead is Rocco’s hand before everything broke. Then the traffic light changes, and the illusion dies.

I keep breathing, but it doesn’t feel like life anymore.

All I taste is iron.