Eli
Sleep doesn’t even pretend to come near me.
The room is dark except for the weak yellow glow of the night-light near the bassinet, soft enough not to wake the baby and bright enough that I can still see the outline of her tiny body through the mesh side when I turn my head.
I’m flat on my back on top of the covers, one arm behind my head, the other over my stomach, staring at the ceiling hard enough that I could probably map every damn crack in the paint by morning.
The house has gone mostly quiet now. The Sin Bin is never truly silent, but tonight it’s close. A tired hush that settles over a place after too much happens in too little time.
Julian still isn’t back.
I check my phone again, even though I tell myself I’m not going to.
The screen lights up against my face with no new messages, no missed calls from him, no nothing.
I know he has his own life. I know I’m not owed every second of his attention just because my world exploded and he was the first one to step into the crater with me.
I know all of that, and still, there’s this restless, ugly little knot in my gut that keeps tightening every time I hear a car on the road that isn’t his.
I could text him, but I don’t want to be a bother.
That sounds pathetic even in my own head, but there it is.
I’ve already taken too much from him these last two days.
His sleep, his calm, his time, his steady hands on my daughter when mine are shaking.
His voice in the middle of every panic, telling me what comes next because I don’t know, and he does.
The last thing I’m going to do is become one more thing he has to manage tonight.
Instead, I lie there and think, but that turns out to be worse because the lawyer’s visit this afternoon replays in vicious little loops the longer the house stays quiet. Mara sat in my room while my daughter slept six feet away and explained—in very calm terms—just how messy my life is now.
Paternity first. Confirmation before assumption.
Until results come back, I’m not to speak in absolutes to anyone outside the house or the legal team.
If she’s biologically mine, then the papers Celeste left matter, but they don’t magically erase due process.
Voluntary relinquishment of parental rights is not a casual handwritten note and a disappearing act.
There are procedures, courts, and filings that vary by state and timeline.
And underneath all of it, quieter but somehow louder than the rest, Mara had looked at me over clasped hands and said, very carefully, “Mr. Matthews, we also need to preserve the possibility that conception may not have occurred with your informed and voluntary consent.”
That sentence has been lodged under my skin ever since. I still keep circling back to the same dumb, desperate question, thinking if I ask it enough, it’ll somehow change the answer.
Can a man even get raped that way?
Mara answered it before I could ask. Maybe she saw it in my face or had this conversation before. Maybe there’s a whole category of men who sit where I sat today, shoulders tight, shame in their throats, trying to reconcile biology with the fact that your body can do things without permission.
“Yes,” she’d said simply. “A man can be sexually assaulted. A man can be raped. There are substances that can cause sedation, confusion, impaired consent, and fragmented memory. But proving the exact substance, this late, is often difficult if no test was done right away. The legal framing depends on jurisdiction, but from a practical and investigative perspective, yes. Absolutely.”
Absolutely. As if there was no room for confusion in the answer at all. The confusion is still in me, though. It’s all through me, tangled into every memory I have of Celeste and every night I drove home from seeing her, feeling wrung out and weirdly foggy.
I drag a hand over my face and stare at the wall. I’m not crying again. I’ve cried enough in front of Julian for one fucking lifetime, and the lawyer’s words are still true whether I cry or not. The baby is still here whether I cry or not.
A tiny sound comes from the bassinet, and I turn my head fast enough that my neck protests.
I sit up and lean over enough to see her better through the mesh. “Hey, baby girl,” I whisper.
My voice sounds rough in the quiet. If she isn’t mine, I don’t know what the hell happens then, and the fact that particular thought hurts at all tells me everything I need to know about how deep I’m already in.
If she is mine, then everything becomes even more real. My child, my responsibility… and my possible evidence.
I hate that last one. Hate it so much I nearly shove the whole line of thought away on instinct. But it sits there anyway.
I miss Julian. That’s the humiliating, simple truth at the center of everything.
I miss my best friend. I miss when being around him felt easy instead of charged, awkward, and full of all the things neither of us says.
I miss his voice in my room without wondering if I deserve it.
I miss throwing shit at him from across the couch and hearing him swear in Afrikaans under his breath.
I miss the version of us that didn’t require so much caution.
I’m still staring at nothing when I hear the front door downstairs. Voices, and one of them is Julian’s. My heartbeat speeds up, and I rub a hand over my face just as there’s a soft knock on my half-open door.
“Yeah,” I call, trying to sound casual and failing.
Julian pushes the door open all the way, steps inside, and something in me goes cold immediately.
He looks… off. Tired in a way that has nothing to do with football practice.
His curls are a mess, not from shower steam or helmet hair but from hands dragged through them too many times.
There’s a tightness around his mouth that wasn’t there this morning, and when his eyes hit mine, there’s a split-second delay before he puts the usual expression back on.
“You’re still awake,” he says.
I sit up. “Yeah, and you’re late.”
He shuts the door behind him and leans back against it for a second, the picture of casual if you don’t know him. I do know him. I know the difference between Julian relaxed and Julian performing relaxed, and right now he’s acting the part so excessively I want to throw something.
“Yeah, something came up,” he says, but it sounds practiced. “How’d the meeting go?”
He does that on purpose. Redirects. Gives me something else to focus on, so I stop looking too closely at him. But still, the question sits there between us, and I’m too worn down to fight two battles at once.
“It was…” I scrub a hand over my jaw and look toward the bassinet because it’s easier than looking straight at him when I say the next part.
“A lot. Killian was right about the lawyer. She was good and explained everything. Temporary custody stuff, DNA process, what happens if the results come back and she’s mine, and what happens if she’s not.
” My laugh comes out hollow. “Apparently, my life is very paperwork-heavy now.”
He slides his hands into his pockets and walks to my desk, leaning against it. I catch the tiny stiffness in the movement. It vanishes as fast as it appears, but I see it, and my stomach knots harder. Still, he keeps his voice steady when he asks, “What’d she say about Celeste?”
There’s no point pretending I don’t know what he means. “She said if I didn’t consent, or if I was too out of it to consent, then…” I stop and swallow. “Then it matters. Legally.”
Julian doesn’t say anything.
“She asked a lot of questions. About what I remember, and whether Celeste pushed me before, and if I ever told her no. About the nights I couldn’t remember clearly. I’m sure I sounded like such a fucking idiot.”
His voice comes low and firm. “No, you didn’t.”
I lift my head. “You weren’t there.”
“I didn’t have to be.”
The certainty in that should soothe me. Instead, it makes something inside me crack wider.
“She kept saying I’m not crazy,” I mutter. “That uncertainty is normal. That shame makes people second-guess themselves. That men get sexually assaulted too.” I stop and look at him, hating how small my voice sounds.
“Part of me keeps thinking maybe I’m twisting it. Maybe I should’ve known. Maybe I did know and just didn’t want to admit it because then I’d have to…” I shake my head once, angry at myself. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just trying to make sense of something awful by making it worse.”
“Eli,” he says, but I don’t look at him. “You are not making it worse by calling it what it might be.”
I let out a breath that sounds almost like a laugh, except there’s no humor in it. “Yeah, well, it feels dramatic as shit.”
His voice hardens. “Then your feelings are wrong on that one.”
That startles a glance out of me. He’s watching me with his jaw tight, and for a moment, all I can think is that something definitely happened to him tonight. Something bad enough that it’s sitting under his skin while he stands here making room for my mess anyway.
I open my mouth to ask about it, but the words get crowded out by everything else inside me.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
His eyebrows pull together at once. “For what?”
Another laugh escapes me, rough and disbelieving.
“For all of it,” I say, and my voice gets uglier with every word.
“For pushing you away and not listening when you tried to warn me about her., and letting everything between us get so fucking weird that I didn’t even know how to look at you half the time. ”
He lets out a stuttered breath. “Eli—”
“No, please listen.” I drag both hands through my hair and let them fall. “I missed you, Jules. I missed you so bad, and I still didn’t know how to talk to you because every time I thought about it, I just felt guilty and defensive and stupid.”
I swallow and keep going before I can lose my nerve. “I kept thinking I’d wait for the right moment to fix things. Then there never was one, or there was, and I screwed it up. Or I chickened out. I don’t know.”
His eyes lift to mine. “You don’t have to make this one of your apology projects just because everything else is burning,” he says.
“I know that,” I say. “I’m saying it because it’s true.”
He studies me for a long second. Then his gaze drops to the bassinet and softens at the sight of the baby sleeping there. When he looks back at me, there’s something tired in him that makes me want to ask what happened after practice and refuse to let him dodge me this time.
I shake my head, more frustrated with myself than with him. “I feel so fucking stupid.”
Julian’s whole face changes at that. “You’re not stupid,” he says.
“I ignored so much.”
“That doesn’t make you stupid.”
“It sure as hell doesn’t make me smart.”
He pushes off the desk and comes a step closer. “It makes you someone who got manipulated. Stop blaming yourself for not spotting every red flag while you were with her.”
I swallow hard. “You make that sound easy.”
He looks at me with that same unreadable, careful expression from earlier, and I’m hit with the full weight of everything still unsaid between us. All the old history. All the ways I’ve leaned on him without understanding what it might cost him.
I don’t know what to do with that tonight. Maybe he doesn’t either.
So, I reach for the only truth I can carry cleanly. “I really did miss you, Jules.”
He lets out the smallest huff, almost a laugh. Then his eyes drop to the floor for a second before coming back to me. “I missed you, too.”
He looks tired. God, he looks tired. More than tired—used up. And still he came here first. Still, he walked into my room and asked how the meeting went before dealing with whatever the hell is gnawing at him from the inside. Gratitude hits me so hard it almost makes me sick.
“I don’t want us to be fucked up anymore.”
Julian’s face changes again, this time in a way that hurts to look at. Hope, maybe. Fear too. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I don’t know what any of this is gonna look like tomorrow, or after the DNA results, or after I finally deal with my parents, or after all the legal shit.
I don’t know any of it. But I know I don’t want to keep pretending I’m fine with you being halfway out of my life. I want my best friend back.”
He drops his gaze for a second and lets out a breath that sounds wrecked. When he looks back up, his eyes are bright again, and I have the strangest, fiercest urge to get up and cross the room and hold on to him until whatever’s wrong in him loosens its grip.
Instead, I stay where I am and let him come to me if he wants to.
After a long second, he crosses the small space between us and stops in front of me. He doesn’t say anything clever; he just reaches out and presses one hand to the back of my neck, warm and steady, and familiar enough that my whole body sags with relief.
“You’ve still got me,” he says.
That does it. Not enough to make me cry—fuck that, I’m still holding that line—but enough that my eyes sting and my chest hurts in a different way than it did an hour ago.
I tip my head forward until my forehead hits his stomach lightly, the position humiliating and comforting at once. “I don’t deserve you.”
His fingers tighten slightly at the back of my neck. “Probably not.”
A laugh cracks out of me, muffled against his shirt. Then his other hand comes down to rest on my shoulder, and the humor fades into something quieter. “But you’ve still got me anyway.”
I close my eyes as I sit on the edge of my bed with a lawyer’s advice still echoing in my skull, my whole life hanging on test results, court filings, and five unanswered calls from my father.