40. Sage
FORTY
SAGE
“You don’t look ‘fucking amazing.’” Amy steers me to the couch by both shoulders and presses me down onto it. She crouches in front of me, takes my face in both hands, and tips my chin toward the window like she’s inspecting fruit for bruises. “Why is your mouth bleeding?”
“It’s barely—”
“There is visible blood. Exiting your face. Sage.” Her voice drops into something low. “Did someone do this to you? Because I’m small but I’m feral. I’ve watched a lot of true crime. I know where the soft parts are.”
“Nobody did anything to me.”
“Then why do you look like you went three rounds with—” She stops. Her whole face recalibrates, eyebrows climbing toward her hairline. “Oh . . .”
“Amy—”
“Oh my God.” She lets go of my face and grabs my hand instead, like she needs a piece of me to hold onto for the ride. “You got kissed.”
I press my lips together, which is a mistake, because it makes me wince, which she clocks.
“You got kissed hard.” She’s vibrating. “But seriously. You’re okay? He didn’t scare you?”
“Nothing scary about it.” I can’t hold back my grin. “It was an amazing kiss.”
“Oh my God. Was it the hardware guy? From the other night—Milo?”
“No.”
“No?” She says it like the word personally wounds her. “Which means there’s a someone, and the someone isn’t the one I already met. Sage. Sage.”
“His name’s Holden.”
She goes still. “Who’s Holden?”
I weigh it for half a second. There’s no full version of the truth I can hand her. But there’s a shape of it I can. “He’s a cop.”
What happens to Amy’s face should be studied by science. Her mouth drops open. Her eyes go enormous. She points at the door, then at me, then back at the door.
“Tall,” she says. “Brown hair. Blue eyes. Built like a fitness model. Forearms that should be illegal. I passed him on the stairs and thought, that man is either a detective or a felon, and honestly, either way, I’d climb that. Was that Holden?”
Heat crawls up my neck. “Maybe.”
“Maybe.” She smacks the couch cushion. “It’s a yes. Your face is doing a yes.”
I cover it with both hands. She’s right. My face is a traitor.
“Okay,” I say into my palms. “Don’t make it a whole thing.”
“It’s already a thing. It’s been a thing for the four seconds since I learned his forearms exist.” She pulls my hands down. “Is it serious? What happened to Milo?”
“Milo is still happening.”
I brace for impact. Amy’s voice goes up a full octave. “Still?” Her eyes flare. “Oh my God, are you doing a love triangle?”
“No. No, and also, selfishly, I could never handle the drama—”
“You are handling the drama. Right now. In real time. With two professional-grade hotties.” She flops back onto the couch next to me, clutching a throw pillow like she’s going to hyperventilate into its sequins.
“Do they know about each other?”
“They do. They all know about each other, actually.”
It’s out before I can sand the edges off it. Amy freezes mid-bounce.
“All?” Her eyes go wide, and I scramble to figure out how much truth I can hand her.
I can’t tell her there are five. Can’t tell her they’re one thing—a single unit that has, with terrifying calm, decided to share me. As open and accepting as Amy is, I don’t think even she could understand what I’m doing with one group of five men.
So I give her the only version that’s clean.
“I’m seeing a few people,” I say. “Casually. Figuring out what I want. Nothing’s labeled. But we’re all open with each other. Radical honesty and all that.”
For a second I think she’s going to look at me the way Tyler looks at me. Like I’m a problem with legs.
Instead she lights up like a small town getting power for the first time.
“Sage.” She grabs both my hands. “Do you have any idea—you came here a ghost. You flinched at the toaster for a week. And now you’re sitting here with a bitten lip and options.
” She’s actually misting up. “I have a documented history of strong opinions about people being single, and you are out here dating plural, and I have never been prouder of anyone.”
I laugh, and it’s real, and it cracks something loose in my chest I didn’t know was clenched.
“You’re being safe though, right?” she adds, sobering by a degree. “I’m not your mom, I’m just—condoms. Are we doing condoms? As your emergency contact I am legally—”
“You’re not my emergency contact.”
“I should be. We’ll fix that.” She squeezes. “Safe? Yes?”
“I’m safe, Amy.”
There’s no safer place on the planet than inside the attention of five men who would take the world apart before they let it touch me.
“Okay.” I shift so I’m facing her properly, before she can fire off any follow-up questions. “Your turn. How are things with Tyler?”
It’s small, the change. If I wasn’t looking at her directly, I might miss it. The smile stays but the wattage drops, like someone reached behind her eyes and turned a dial.
“Good,” she says. “Busy. You know.”
“Amy.”
“He’s stressed. Brock’s still—” She gets up and gets our lattes from the table and talks to me over her shoulder.
“He’s really worried about Brock. They’ve been friends since they were kids.
And I get it, I do, I just—” She hands my coffee to me and settles back onto the couch.
“I think he’s a little bit taking it out on me. ”
“Taking it out on you how?”
“Just—mood. He gets short. He doesn’t like when I’m here.” She gestures at our apartment. “He says I’m a different person when I’m with you. Which, fine, maybe. But it’s my—” She catches herself. Smiles, smaller. “It’s nothing. Rough patch.”
I keep my voice level, because the second I sound like I’m prosecuting, she’ll shut the door. “I’m here to listen, Aims. You’ve never judged me once. I’m not about to do the same to you.”
She picks at the cardboard sleeve on her cup. Peels a strip of it back. Doesn’t look at me.
“It’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid if you can’t say it.”
That lands somewhere. Her jaw works. When she finally talks, it’s quiet, like she’s confessing to the coffee.
“I feel like a prude or something.”
“Are you?”
She glances up at me. “No. But, he’s into stuff.
In bed. And when I’m not into the same things he acts like I’m being difficult.
Like there’s something wrong with me for not wanting it.
” She lets out a breath that shakes on the way out.
“And he keeps wanting to—take pictures. Videos. And I keep saying no, and he keeps asking, in this way that makes it feel like the no is the problem.”
The temperature in me drops about forty degrees. I keep my face soft because hers has gone fragile.
“What kind of stuff?” I ask. “In bed. If you’re comfortable sharing.”
“Just—” She waves a hand, vague, eyes going glassy. “Stuff that makes me feel small. Degrading. I don’t want to get into it.” She shakes her head, hard. “It’s fine. I just don’t love it.”
I don’t love it. Like it’s a restaurant he keeps dragging her to.
Every part of me that learned the hard way what it looks like when a man decides your no is a negotiation is standing up and screaming.
But I know how this goes. Push too hard and she folds back into Tyler like a turtle, and I lose the inch I just got.
So I sit on my hands. Literally. Tuck my fingers under my thighs.
“Do you need to come home?” I ask.
She looks up, and her eyes are wet and stubborn and so painfully Amy.
“I am home,” she says.
And it guts me, because she means both things: this couch, this apartment with her name still on the lease, and the fact that she isn’t ready to do anything about Tyler. Not yet.
I open my mouth to push, gently, one more inch—
Her phone goes off on the table. It rattles against the cardboard tray, the screen lighting with a photo of Tyler grinning in sunglasses, and her whole body changes. Spine straightening. Shoulders climbing toward her ears.
She answers fast. “Hey—”
I can’t hear the words on the other end. I don’t need to. I can hear the shape of them—the clipped male rhythm, the rising edge—and I watch it land on her, watch her fold a little smaller with every sentence I can’t make out.
“I’m at home . . . Sage is here, yes . . . I told you I—I know. I guess I lost track of time.” Her eyes flick to me, apologetic, panicked. “No. No, I’m leaving right now. Five minutes.” A pause. Whatever he says makes her flinch. “Okay. Okay. Bye.”
She’s already standing. Already gathering her purse, her keys, her sunglasses.
“He’s home earlier than he said,” she says, breathless, not meeting my eyes. “I have to go.”
“Amy.” I stand too. “Are you safe?”
She stops at the question. The brightness comes back, manufactured and brittle—the kind I recognize because I’ve worn it.
“I’m fine,” she says. “It’s a rough patch. Couples have those.” She slings the bag over her shoulder. “But—I think . . . I’m going to start staying in my own bed again. Here. I’ll tell him that. Soon. I need my own space for a bit.” A wobbly smile. “I miss my own pillows. And my unhinged roommate.”
It’s not nothing. It’s a crack of daylight under a closed door. I’ll take it.
“Good,” I say. “I’ll fight Tyler for custody if I have to. I’m scrappy and I have nothing to lose.”
She laughs, wet and grateful, and pulls me into a hug that’s too tight and goes a beat too long, her chin hooked over my shoulder. She smells like Beanwerks and the perfume she always wears.
“Love you, bestie,” she says into my hair.
“Love you too. Call me. Text me. I’ll be here.”
“I will.”
She won’t, probably. But she’s gone before I can say anything more—the door clicking shut, her footsteps quick down the hall—and the apartment closes around me, quiet, with two lattes going cold on the table and the throb of my own bitten lip.
I stand there a while.
Then I pick up my phone, open the group chat Milo named over every one of my objections—Kitten’s Hangmen—and type before I can talk myself out of it.
Me:
random question. should I be worried about Tyler?
The reply comes fast enough that I know at least one of them has been sitting on his phone.
Milo:
we’re already looking into him, kitten. why? everything okay?
I look at the door Amy just walked out of. At the latte she left behind.
Me:
I’m okay. just worried about Amy.
Three dots. Stop. Start again. Then a new name slides into the thread.
Micah:
then we’ll keep an eye out for her too. promise.
And God help me, that promise helps. It shouldn’t. I know exactly what these men do when they decide somebody’s a problem.
I picture Tyler grinning behind his sunglasses, and something ugly uncoils in my gut.
Then I picture him at the end of a rope.
That probably says something terrible about me. But I don’t have time to analyze it before a fresh message drops in.
Holden:
Tell me exactly what happened.
Another.
Knox:
Start at the beginning.
And then, because apparently emotional triage with these men comes in a full tactical spread—
Eli:
Did he threaten her?
I stare at the screen. At the sliver of contact.
My thumbs hover. Then I type.
Me:
Not directly. But I’d rather talk in person.
The dots appear from three different people at once. But only one message comes through.
Micah:
One of us will be there soon.