Chapter 57
fifty-seven
. . .
WHITNEY
“I love you.”
The words land between us and everything in me just…stops.
For one strange, suspended second, I can still hear the video in my head. That ugly, slurring version of Connor with the whiskey bottle and the smirk and the words that hit every old bruise I thought I had at least learned how to live with.
Then there’s the Connor standing in front of me now. Wrecked. Pale under the hotel lighting. Looking like he’s just handed me the softest part of himself by accident and is too far gone to snatch it back. And somewhere in the middle is me, apparently.
I’m still holding my phone. Still feeling the sting of that video in one hand and the weight of I love you in the other.
But I can’t say it back.
Even though I feel the shape of it in my chest, and it does matter.
It matters enough to make my knees feel a little unsteady.
But I’m still trying to breathe through the fact that ten minutes ago, I opened a link from an unknown number and watched the man I’m falling for reduce me to a thing he could play with just to get back at Rory, and laugh, like it was the funniest thing in the world.
So, I just stand there, staring at him, my heart beating too hard and too uneven to be able to offer him anything at the moment.
Connor’s face shifts like every second of my silence is killing him.
A knock on the door cuts through the silence.
It’s hard, fast, and somehow familiar. Every muscle in my body goes rigid.
Connor goes still, too.
Then Rory’s voice comes through the door.
“Whit?”
Connor’s eyes lock on mine.
I can see the question in them. An unspoken concern.
What do you want me to do?
The worst part is, I don’t know.
I don’t know if I want him to stay or leave.
I don’t know if I want to scream or cry or make the whole rest of the world disappear for ten minutes so I can think in peace.
“Whitney?” Rory calls again, sharper this time.
Connor shifts back automatically, already reading the panic on my face, already preparing to make himself scarce.
“Don’t,” I say quietly.
He stills.
The knock comes again.
I drag in a breath that does absolutely nothing to steady me, then move toward the door, wiping at my face like maybe I can erase the last fifteen minutes if I press hard enough.
When I open it, Rory’s standing there with that look on his face—the one that says he’s angry, and worried, and already halfway to violence, but trying to behave because I’m the one standing in front of him.
He steps forward like he’s going to pull me into a hug. Then he sees Connor, and everything in him changes. His body goes tight. His jaw locks, and his whole expression hardens around the eyes.
Connor is a few feet behind me, hovering in that careful space between restraint and wanting to reach for me.
Rory looks from me to him and back again.
Then, to Connor. “Did you come here to apologize for the vile shit you said about my sister?” He says, flat and dangerous.
Connor takes it without flinching. “Yes,” he says, voice strained. “Among other things.”
Rory laughs once, but there’s nothing warm in it. “Among other things.”
“Rory,” I say, because the last thing I need is for this to become a testosterone fueled turf war in my hotel room. But he doesn’t look at me.
His eyes stay on Connor. “You thought that was funny?”
Connor’s jaw tightens. “No.”
“The hell you didn’t. You laughed.”
“I was drunk, and stupid, and trying to be someone I’m not proud of. I know exactly what it sounds like.”
Rory takes one step into the room. “It sounds like you used my sister’s name to take a shot at me.”
Connor doesn’t move.
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s what I did.”
It sounds so simple. And I almost hate him for it.
There’s no attempt to dodge. No excuse or attempt to soften it.
It’s just the truth.
Rory finally looks at me, and somehow that hurts worse.
“I’m sorry you even had to hear that,” he says immediately. “I’m sorry this exists at all.”
At his words, my throat tightens, because under all the anger, he’s still my brother. Still trying to get to me first and trying to protect me from something he can’t actually do anything about.
Then his gaze cuts back to Connor.
“So what the hell are you still doing here?”
The room goes quiet again.
I know, with sudden horrible clarity, that I could avoid the truth. I could simply say he came to apologize, and keep the rest of it tucked away where it’s been living since the Rising Tides tour.
But that bubble burst the second Rory found Connor in my room while I was holding a video of him talking about me like I was a revenge fantasy with a pulse.
And for all the ways tonight has made me feel small and exposed and handled by other people’s choices, one thing cuts through it with startling force:
I refuse to stand here and let two men talk around me like I’m damage from their history.
“Because we’re together,” I say.
My words settle between the three of us, and Rory just stares at me.
For one weird second, he actually looks like he didn’t understand the sentence.
Then his eyes flick to Connor and back to me, and I can practically see the last few weeks rearranging themselves in his head. The tour. Connor showing up here first. The look on Connor’s face, and mine. It’s more than just a regretful video that hurt a teammate.
Rory’s voice drops. “What?”
“Connor and I are together,” I say, more steadily now. “We’ve been together since the tour. Since Wilmington.”
Behind me, Connor stays quiet.
Which I appreciate more than I can deal with right now, because the last thing I need is for him to jump in and explain us for me.
Rory blinks once, hard, like maybe that’ll reset the conversation into something less insane.
It doesn’t.
“You’re together,” he repeats.
“Yeah.”
“You. With him.”
There is something about brothers that makes them uniquely capable of reducing the most emotionally catastrophic revelation of your life into three words and a look of personal offense.
“Yes,” I say, because apparently I’m the calm one now. “We’re dating.”
Rory drags a hand over his mouth and turns away for a second, pacing two steps into the room before stopping himself like he just remembered it’s not his room to pace in.
Then he turns back.
“This is why the video leaked?”
Connor answers that one before I can.
“Probably.”
Rory shoots him a look sharp enough to chip paint off a wall. “I wasn’t talking to you.”
Connor’s jaw tightens, but he stays quiet.
And weirdly, that matters, too.
Because the old Connor probably would have. This one just stands there looking wrecked and tired and guilty enough to make my chest ache even while I’m still angry.
Rory looks at me again, and now his anger appears to be split cleanly down the middle. Half of it for the video. While half is for the fact that I’ve apparently been sleeping with the man he doesn’t want me anywhere near.
“Since the tour?”
“It happened on tour. But we knew each other before he came to Coral Cove. We met online. Gaming.”
His eyes close briefly.
Of all the reactions I imagined if Rory ever found out about Connor and me, this one somehow hadn’t made the list. I braced for shouting. For instant fury. Instead, he looks exhausted like his whole internal filing system has burst into flames.
“I don’t even know what to say,” he mutters.
“That makes two of us,” I say, and it comes out more brittle than I mean it to.
That brings his eyes back to me fast.
And then, because he’s my brother before he’s anything else, the fight goes out of him just enough for him to really look at my face.
“Hey,” he says, quieter now, his expression shifting. “Come here.”
I don’t realize how close I am to falling apart.
It isn’t dramatic. I don’t sob or even cry, which feels a little unfair given the emotional violence of the last fifteen minutes. But something in me goes loose around the edges.
Still, I don’t move.
Because Connor is still behind me, and he just told me he loves me. Which is impossible to process when that video is still sitting like a shard of glass under my ribs.
So instead of stepping into Rory’s arms, I just stand there and say, very carefully, “I’m okay.”
It’s not true, but it’s the best I can do.
Rory knows it, too. I can see it in his face.
He looks between me and Connor again, and when he speaks, it’s to Connor this time.
“You need to go.”
The words hang in the room.
Connor doesn’t argue. He just looks at me, and that feels worse.
Worse than a fight. Worse than a defense. Worse than anything, really, because what’s in his face isn’t resistance.
It’s restraint.
Like if I told him to stay, he would. If I told him to leave, he’d do that, too.
And suddenly I hate that the decision is mine, because I don’t currently have the emotional capacity to make these kinds of decisions.
I can see the way Connor’s keeping himself still for my sake. At the apology still written on his face, unsoftened by time or comfort or any assumption that I’m just going to get over this because he said the right thing after.
I believe him, but I’m still hurt.
Both things can be true.
“Go,” I say softly, because Rory being here has sucked all the oxygen out of the room and I don’t know how to process any of this with my brother standing in the doorway and the whole hotel probably one text away from combustion.
Connor nods once.
No fight. No visible flinch. Just one hard swallow.
“Okay,” he says.
Then, quieter, just for me, “I’m not disappearing.”
That nearly undoes me on the spot.
He looks at Rory once, says nothing, then walks past him into the hall.
When the door closes behind him, Rory turns back to me.
That’s when I realize if I stay in this room another second I may actually lose what’s left of my grip.
“I need air.”
Rory opens his mouth, probably to tell me not to go alone, which is adorable and definitely not what I need.
“I’m getting Winnie,” I add before he can say anything else.
Winnie is exactly who I need. Someone who won’t try to protect me, manage the fallout, or make me survive another conversation while my body is in one place and my brain is still back in that doorway with Connor saying I love you like it was dragged out of him like a life raft.
“Okay,” he says. And it’s the gentlest he’s sounded since he got here.
I grab my key card off the side table, and head for the door before I can think too hard about any of it.