"Do you ever regret it?" The word she means to say is "me", but she knows David can put two and two together.
𝗨𝗡𝗣𝗥𝗢𝗠𝗣𝗧𝗘𝗗
A litany of responses come to mind, each one with their own distinct voice, motivated by something different. The hopeless romantic, the jilted lover, the jaded immortal, all clamoring in the back of his mind in the hopes that one will eventually claw itself free. A bedstead made of silt and loam, laid down dry and poorly kept—the dead were never meant to bestir themselves like this.
David exhales the smoke-rattle trapped in his lungs, nostrils flared and mouth agape, the taste of midnight fresh on his tongue as he lets the cigarette drift further and further away, tempted to let it fizzle out in the sand. She's waiting for an answer, but he doesn't have one yet. Too much noise in the back of his mind, too many voices impossible to distinguish from one another. Because it doesn't matter if he's a hopeless romantic, or a jilted lover, or a jaded immortal, or something else entirely. The dead all die the same in the end, their sun-bleached bones reclaimed by the ground beneath their feet.
How many skeletons have you buried, David Williams?
"What do you want me to say, Star?" David says quietly, forcing himself to look elsewhere as he offers her the cigarette, blood welling in the canthus. Of course he regrets it. Of course he'd do it all again. He doesn't fucking know, and it kills him not to know because the answer never stays the same for very long, and neither of them are ever going to be happy with it because honesty is like pulling teeth and forcing them into the shape of someone else's mouth and asking them to chew.
"I don't...I don't know," David whispers, blood dripping down his cheeks.
Maybe the most honest thing he's ever said to her.