6 #5
“No answer?” he asked. “Still?”
“Stop,” I said, but my voice shook.
His laugh was ugly and hollow. “Right. That tracks.”
Ryan grabbed him with both hands. “You’re done.”
“I asked her a question.”
“And I told you to shut the fuck up,” Ryan said, stepping fully between us. “You’re done.”
Easton looked at Ryan like he might swing, but Ryan didn’t move. He didn’t look angry.
He looked ready, which was worse.
Briggs pressed an arm across Easton’s chest while Rider kept one hand locked around his shoulder. Easton didn’t use his fists, but he fought them with every breath, all forward momentum, fury, and heartbreak that had stopped caring who watched it humiliate itself.
His eyes never left mine.
“You are the cruel one, Clarke!” he roared, his voice cutting through the entire house. “You need me alone and miserable so you can pretend you didn’t make me this!”
The words struck hard enough that I almost stepped backward.
Charm tightened her grip on my arm. Bliss made a broken sound beside me.
Cade’s voice cracked like a whip. “Enough!”
Easton breathed hard through his nose, but he didn’t look at Cade. He stared at me like the answer still belonged to him if he could rip hard enough.
“No,” he said, his voice rough and vicious. “I want her to answer. I want her to tell me why I had to pay for shit I didn’t do. I want her to tell me why every time I got close to something that hurt her, I became the asshole for not knowing where the line was.”
The room went so quiet the bass from the living room sounded too loud.
My throat tightened.
I looked at my girls. “Tell him. You’re both so certain that knowing my damage will cure us, so go ahead.”
Then I looked at Easton. “Ask them.”
Charm stepped toward me. “Aura, please. We didn’t mean—”
“Leave me alone.”
“Aura.”
I spun around, and she stopped short. “I said leave me alone.”
Her eyes filled, but she didn’t come closer.
Bliss tried anyway because she loved like a reflex and didn’t know how to stop even when it hurt everyone involved. “I’ll take you home.”
“No.”
“You shouldn’t be alone right now.”
A laugh tore from me, sharp, ugly, and shaking around the edges. “You should’ve thought of that before you decided I needed an audience for my trauma.”
Bliss went pale.
Cade stepped toward her, but his eyes were on me. “Aura.”
I looked at him once. “Don’t you dare.”
He stopped.
Good.
At least one person in the room still recognized a boundary when it was drawn in blood.
Behind him, Easton had not moved. Briggs stood close to his side, one hand half lifted like he wasn’t sure whether touching Easton would hold him together or set him off. Rider watched me with a face too quiet to read.
Ryan stood near the island with his arms down now, no longer Switzerland so much as a man who had realized the war was already lost.
Maybe Cade needed Bliss to protect Easton. Maybe Ryan needed Charm to believe Easton’s pain mattered as much as mine.
Neither of them got to spend my trauma keeping their men comfortable.
I turned and walked out before anyone could ask for another piece of me.
The porch air hit my face cold and damp, the kind of late-night Michigan air that smelled like wet grass, beer, and approaching rain. Music continued thudding through the walls, stupid and alive, like the house hadn’t just gone silent around something none of us could fix.
The front door opened behind me.
“Aura,” Charm called.
I kept walking down the steps. “Go back inside.”
“Please.”
I pulled up the Uber app with shaking fingers and didn’t turn around. “I said leave me alone.”
Bliss came outside next. I heard her before I saw her, her breathing uneven and small.
“Ay—”
I stopped on the wet walkway and looked back.
Both of them froze on the porch.
“Do not follow me,” I said.
Bliss’s tears spilled over. Charm looked wrecked.
Good, some awful part of me thought. Let someone else feel ruined for five minutes.
The driver was seven minutes away, which was too long, but remaining there with the house glowing behind them and every window full of people who had watched me break was not an option.
I crossed the lawn instead of waiting near the curb. My boots sank slightly into the wet grass, and my phone buzzed before I reached the sidewalk.
Bliss.
I declined the call.
Charm called next, and I declined that too.
Then I opened my location settings and turned sharing off.
For one second, my thumb hovered over the screen, and something inside me almost softened because they were my girls, my sisters, and the women who had held me together before I knew how to make myself look whole.
The Uber rolled up five minutes later, its headlights sliding over the curb and catching the wet pavement in white streaks.
I got in without looking back at Hockey House.
The driver glanced at me in the mirror. “Everything okay?”
I smiled because apparently my face still knew how.
“Perfect,” I said.
Then I looked out the window while the house disappeared behind us, bright, loud, and full of people I loved who had finally found the one place I would not let them follow.