Chapter 23 Say Yes to Me
TWENTY-THREE
SAY YES TO ME
TROY
The coffee shop was too warm and too crowded for the conversation we were supposed to be having, but Luka had insisted on meeting here instead of the house. He'd said we both needed to get out, needed to stop treating Declan's place like a bunker and remember what normal looked like.
I wasn't sure I remembered what normal looked like anymore.
I'd picked the corner booth near the back wall, close enough to the door that I could watch who came in without being obvious about it.
Old habit. The window beside me ran with condensation from the heat pressing outward against the cold, and the street beyond the glass looked gray and slow, slush piled against the curbs from a snowfall two days ago that nobody had gotten around to clearing.
People moved past bundled in coats and scarves like the city wasn't rotting underneath them.
Must be nice.
I'd been nursing the same black coffee for twenty minutes while it went cold.
The shop smelled like dark roast and steamed milk and the particular brand of artificial warmth that came from too many bodies packed into too small a space.
Music played low overhead, acoustic and forgettable.
The ambient noise was enough cover that nobody nearby could pick up what we were saying without actively trying, which was probably why Luka had chosen this place to begin with.
He'd arrived exactly on time. Ordered an Americano at the counter, collected it without ceremony, settled across from me with his tablet open and his coat still half on like he might need to leave fast. We'd been here fifteen minutes already and he'd spent most of them moving through whatever he had on his screen while I sat there turning my cup in slow circles on the table and trying not to look like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“Still nothing?” he asked, eyes still on the tablet.
“Nothing.” I set my cup down harder than I meant to. “No pings on his phone. No credit card activity. No sightings anywhere in the network. It's like he dropped off the face of the earth.”
“He didn't drop anywhere.” Luka scrolled past whatever he was reading. “He's just better at staying hidden than we anticipated. He knows we've made him. So he's gone quiet and he's waiting until he decides what move comes next.”
“And in the meantime we just sit here while he plans whatever the fuck he wants.”
“We stay alert and we keep living our lives in the meantime, because the alternative is handing him control through absence.” He closed the tablet and set it flat on the table. “Letting him make you paranoid and reactive is part of the strategy. You know that.”
I knew it fine. Didn't make it any less like standing on a floor that might not hold.
“Declan brought Mara on as co-owner,” I said.
Easier to be talking about facts than the crawl of anxiety I'd been managing since Rafael went dark.
“She's capable. But the learning curve on the business side is steep and Rafael had been running most of it for a year. There's a lot of ground to recover.”
“How's Declan handling it?”
“Like Declan handles everything. Head down. Keep working. Don't talk about it.” I turned my cup again. “His fight is tomorrow.”
Luka looked up from the tablet. “I'll be there.”
“You don't have to—”
“I'm going to be there, Troy.” His tone closed the door on the conversation. “Declan matters to you. Which means he matters to me. That's how it works.”
The plain straightforwardness of it landed somewhere I hadn't been braced for. I looked away, out at the gray street, and didn't say anything for a moment.
“The face you're making right now,” Luka said.
“Don't.”
“It's an observation. You always look like you've been ambushed when someone names what you're actually feeling.”
“Because it usually feels like one.” I brought my eyes back to him. “You said I talked about him a lot. In London.”
“Constantly.” He picked up his Americano and took a drink.
“You'd be halfway through a debrief and suddenly drop in something like, 'Declan used to do this.
' Or you'd go quiet mid-conversation and come back off by about fifteen degrees, and it was always because something had reminded you of Chicago.” He set his cup down.
“I notice things. It's reflex. And what I kept noticing was that Declan occupied more space in your head than you were willing to account for.”
“People think about their families.”
“The way you think about him isn't the way people think about family.”
He didn't say it to cut me. Just laid it out flat between us, patient enough to let it sit there without pressing for a reaction.
I looked at him across the table. He was watching me with that steady, measuring attention that made him effective at everything and exhausting to be around in moments like this one.
“How's it going between you two?” he asked. “Actually going. Not the version you'd give someone who hadn't known you for six years.”
The question settled over the table with more weight than I'd been expecting. I turned my cup. The ceramic scraped against the wood.
“It's weird,” I said finally.
“Weird how?”
“Weird like I spent years telling myself the anger was the whole story. That it was just rage and old grief and the need to put distance between me and everything that reminded me of her.” The admission came out rougher than I'd planned, a little uneven at the edges.
“But I've been looking back at it since I got here, and I'm starting to think the anger was doing a second job the entire time.”
“Which was?”
“Covering up something else I didn't want to look at.” I stared at the table.
“I thought about him too much. Measured things against what he'd think.
Wanted to know if he was watching when I left and then hated myself for caring.
And when I was old enough that the grief angle didn't hold anymore, I just kept calling it resentment because resentment had a story around it I could explain.”
“That's not resentment,” Luka said. “That's fixation.”
“Yeah.” I looked up. “I figured that out eventually.”
“And fixation at that level tends to sit right next to something else.”
I didn't answer that directly. Picked up my cold coffee and drank what was left of it just to do something with my hands.
“I didn't let myself see it until I came back here,” I said.
“Came back and saw him as an actual adult instead of the symbol I'd built out of him. Showed up expecting the same arguments. The same walls. Braced for all of it.” I set the empty cup down.
“And then he was just there. And everything I'd planned to feel came out sideways.”
“What did you notice?”
“Everything.” The word came flat. “The way he moves.
How he takes up a room without pushing for it.
The fact that under all that control there's something running underneath it that he keeps deliberately banked.” I shook my head once.
“I kept noticing things I'd spent years training myself not to see, and each one made me angrier because I couldn't figure out which direction to aim it.”
“At him or yourself?”
“Myself. For noticing. For the fact that the anger had been covering up something I liked even less.” I met his eyes. “A decade of being furious at someone and then walking back into his house and realizing the whole architecture of it was wrong.”
“Inconvenient.”
“Extremely.”
The barista came by without being flagged, topped up our cups with the easy efficiency of someone who'd been watching the table, and left again without interrupting. I wrapped my hands around the fresh warmth of mine.
“You planning to do anything about it,” Luka asked, “or are you going to keep suffering and calling it stability?”
“I told you in London I wasn't running.”
“You did. And you're still here, so that counts.” He settled back against the booth. “But staying and moving toward aren't the same thing. You can plant your feet and still not go anywhere.”
That landed with enough weight that I didn't fire back at it. Just let it sit.
“I don't know how to do this,” I said. “Correctly. On purpose.” I looked at him.
“I know how to be useful. I know how to watch someone's back and show up when things go wrong and handle threats and make myself useful in every way that doesn't require me to sit still and say what I actually want.” I turned my cup on the table.
“I don't know how to just be with someone without making it functional.”
“That's a very honest thing to admit.”
“I'm having a moment. Don't read into it.”
He almost smiled. “How long have you been in love with him?”
The word hit like a fist to the sternum. I sat very still.
“I didn't say that.”
“I know you didn't.” His voice stayed even. “I'm asking how long.”
I didn't answer right away. The coffee shop noise moved around us, a low current of conversation and the hiss of the machine behind the counter and someone's chair scraping across the floor near the door. Outside, the street was starting to go white at the edges where fresh snow was coming down.
“I don't know exactly,” I said. “I've been trying to find the start of it and it keeps going back further than I'm comfortable with.” I looked at him.
“At some point in my early twenties I stopped being generically angry at him and started being angry about specific things that didn't make sense to be angry about.
Like when he'd mention going on a date with someone.
Or when he came home from a fight and let someone else patch him up.
Things that didn't have anything to do with me.” I picked up my coffee. “That's not resentment.”
“No,” Luka said. “That's jealousy.”
“Which means the rest of it was already there and I just hadn't named it.” I drank. Set the cup down. “So yes. Probably longer than I want to think about.”
“And you buried it under the anger because it was easier to carry.”