Chapter 30 #2
Because hatred is easy. Because misinformation spreads faster than truth. Because if Kadin gets ahead of this, the people around Octavia will start protecting her from the wrong things.
What comes out is simpler.
“Because if he’s trying to get me sent back to St. Augustine, fine,” I say.
“Let him try. But he does not get to touch her again. Not through himself, not through your friend group, not through whatever lie he thinks he can make stick. If you want to support him after hearing all this, that’s your choice.
But at least make it with your eyes open. ”
Cheyenne goes still.
The porch falls quiet around us again. This time the silence feels fuller, heavier. Not empty. Processing.
“St. Augustine,” she repeats. “You really think it could go that far?”
“Yes.”
No point softening it.
“And you still told me.”
“Yes.”
That one shakes her more than anything else I’ve said.
Because now she gets it, at least in part. This isn’t me bragging. It isn’t a threat. It’s exposure. I handed her the same leverage Kadin has because I’d rather the people around Octavia have the truth than watch another man weaponize lies around her.
Something in Cheyenne finally changes after that.
Not approval. Not trust. Something more reluctant.
Her arms loosen. She doesn’t uncross them fully, but she stops holding herself like she’s bracing for a fight and starts holding herself like she’s run face-first into a mess she can’t neatly categorize.
“You really are serious about her,” she says.
The sentence lands too lightly for what it means. Maybe that’s why the answer comes out without hesitation.
“I’m not just serious.”
The breeze moves between us, lifting a loose strand of her hair. The neighborhood behind her keeps going, ordinary and oblivious.
“I love her,” I whisper. “That’s all that matters.”
Cheyenne goes still.
Not dramatically. Just enough that I can see the exact moment the words settle all the way in. She had been prepared for want. For possessiveness. Maybe even for obsession dressed up as devotion. Love is different. Love forces a situation to become real, more impossible to laugh off.
Her eyes search my face like she’s looking for the crack, the performance, the place where I’ll smirk or backpedal or make a joke to save us both from the weight of what I just admitted.
I don’t.
Because there is nothing to save here.
“You love her,” she repeats.
It isn’t mockery. It’s the sound of someone testing the shape of a truth they didn’t want to hear and discovering it refuses to get smaller in their mouth.
“Yes.”
The word leaves me quietly, but it lands hard.
For a long second, she doesn’t say anything at all.
Her attention drifts past me, toward the stairwell, toward the part of the house where Octavia is still moving around upstairs completely unaware of what I’ve just handed one of the people she trusts most. Then her eyes come back to mine, something different in them now.
Still wary. Still protective. But less dismissive.
Less willing to write this off as me being one more man with bad instincts and bad timing.
“And she knows that?” Cheyenne asks.
The question is softer than the others were.
“She does.”
That changes her too.
Not because she suddenly approves. But because now she has to reckon with Octavia in it, Octavia choosing, Octavia knowing enough to hear those words and not run. It takes this out of the category of him and places it squarely in the much more frightening category of them.
Cheyenne exhales slowly. When she speaks again, there’s a faint tremor of frustration in it, the kind that comes when a situation refuses to stay simple enough to hate cleanly.
“She is going to kill you for telling me.”
That almost gets a smile out of me.
“Probably.”
“And maybe me too.”
“Definitely maybe.”
That earns the smallest twitch at the corner of her mouth, gone almost before it’s there.
Then her face sobers again. “Love is not all that matters.”
“I know.”
The answer comes fast because she’s right, and because pretending otherwise would cheapen the one honest thing in this conversation.
“I know her past matters. Mine matters. Kadin matters because boys like him don’t let rejection pass quietly. Her parents matter. You matter. Maria matters. The mess matters. But what I feel for her isn’t the part I’m confused about.”
Cheyenne watches me with that same searching look. For the first time since I opened the door, I get the sense that she’s not just trying to decide whether to trust me. She’s trying to decide what to do with the fact that she believes I mean it.
“If she changes her mind?” she asks.
“Then I stop.”
No hesitation. No pride. No bargaining.
The certainty of it seems to strike her harder than the declaration did.
Because men who want to possess don’t answer that quickly. Men who think love makes them entitled don’t leave room for refusal. Cheyenne knows that. I can see it register.
The porch goes quiet again after that, heavy with all the things neither of us can solve in one conversation.
Speaking again, this time there’s a different kind of honesty in her voice. Still sharp, still guarded, but stripped of some of the hostility.
“You really think Kadin is going to come after her through all of us.”
“Yes.”
The word is flat.
“Not because he cares that much about me,” I continue. “Because he cares enough about losing. And men like that don’t need to want a girl to ruin her life. They just need to want someone else to suffer more.”
Looking down at her phone, thumb worrying at the edge of the case, a lot is moving behind her face now.
Old conversations. Group chats. The way Maria probably defended Kadin last night because concern is easier to believe than strategy.
The way Octavia’s silence would have looked from the outside.
The way my saying all of this does not actually protect me from anything.
“That’s why you told me,” she says quietly. “Because now I know enough to hurt you too.”
The truth of that sits between us.
“Yes,” I say.
Her eyes lift to mine again.
“And you still did it.”
“Yes.”
That’s the thing that gets through.
Not the confession. Not the sex. Not even the love.
The risk.
For the first time, Cheyenne looks at me like she understands the depth of what I’m actually handing her. Not gossip. Not leverage. Trust. The kind that says I would rather be destroyed honestly than let another lie wrap itself around Octavia and call itself protection.
A long breath leaves her.
Straightening slightly when she speaks again, the words come steadier.
“If what you’re saying is true, then Kadin doesn’t get to use me or Maria to get to her.”
“He doesn’t.”
“And if what you’re saying isn’t true,” she adds, eyes sharpening again, “I will make your life a special kind of hell.”
That almost makes me laugh.
“I figured.”
Silence again. Wind against the porch rail. The faint creak of the front door behind me where my hand still braces against it.
Cheyenne’s face softens by degrees, not into warmth exactly, but into recognition. Something much more valuable than easy approval.
“Then I guess we do have something in common,” she says.
The sentence lands harder than I expect.
Because she means Octavia. Protecting her. Loving her in whatever form each of us is capable of. Wanting to be one of the hands that steadies her instead of one more thing she has to survive.
Her gaze flicks once more toward the staircase inside the house.
“Tell Octavia to find me at school,” she says. “Don’t be a stranger, Silas.”
That is all Cheyenne gives me.
No grand speech. No promise. No clean forgiveness. Just those last few words and the heavy quiet that follows them as she turns and walks back toward her car, leaving the porch full of everything we just said and everything she now knows.
For a second I just stand there in the doorway watching, the weight of the conversation still settling in my chest. Then Octavia’s voice cuts through it from behind me.
“I should kill you.”
My head turns instantly.
She is standing in the entryway, one hand still near the banister, looking at me with an expression that should match the words and doesn’t.
There is no real anger in her eyes. No fury.
Only that soft, wrecked honesty she gets when she’s trying to say something difficult without dressing it up first.
The line hits anyway, mostly because she sounds tired enough to mean at least part of it.
“But,” she adds, the faintest, saddest humor touching her mouth, “after what you did to me last night… I’m afraid I would only hurt myself more.”
My jaw tightens so hard it aches.
Because I know what she means.
Not just the sex. Not just the way we came apart on each other. The truth of it. The fact that I went and told Cheyenne what happened between us because fear and love collided and apparently my idea of strategy now includes detonating my own life in the driveway.
She studies my face for a second longer, as if waiting to see whether I’ll defend myself or apologize or make it worse by trying to explain too much.
Instead, the only question that rises is the one I least want answered.
“Do you hate me?”
The words come out quieter than I mean them to.
A weak smile pulls at her lips, small enough to stop my heart for half a beat.
“No,” she says.
Just that.
No.
Then she crosses the space between us.
It isn’t rushed. It isn’t hesitant either. She comes to me like she has already decided the answer to every question that matters and now the rest is just learning how to live inside it. Her hands find me first, light against my chest, then she leans up, gently kissing me.
It is not the kind of kiss that begs or burns.
It is softer than that.
A kiss given to steady me.
When she pulls back, she glances out toward the driveway.
Following her gaze, Cheyenne is already in her car, hands on the wheel, but she’s very obviously watching the front door.
Even from here I can see the wide-eyed look on her face when she catches us standing too close, our lips still warm from one another.
Octavia leans in then, close enough that her mouth brushes my ear when she speaks.
“I love you, Silas,” she whispers.
Every part of me goes still.
Adding, softer, with that same tired little thread of humor, “but I’m not the only one suffering this car ride alone.”
Before I can answer, she slips past me, swinging open the passenger-side door of Cheyenne’s car, leaning in just enough to make the point without saying it outright.
Cheyenne gets it immediately.
“Want shotgun?” she calls, the joke dry enough to save all three of us from drowning in the sincerity of the moment.
For the first time all morning, a real smile finally pulls at my mouth