14 #2
He gave me a look like the question was damn near offensive. “I’ve never not wanted her, brother.”
The answer hung between us stripped clean of ego, and I believed him. Not simply because he said it, but because I knew the man sitting across from me. I knew what it looked like when Priest carried something all the way down to the bone and pretended that didn’t mean it owned him too.
“Then you follow the rules,” I said. “You show up. Quit wearin’ ’em like armor.”
The advice came easy.
Too easy.
I had done the opposite. Built distance and called it mercy.
Called it protection. Called it the lesser damage.
Then I spent seventeen years living with Lila carved into me anyway and pretended that made leaving noble.
I had heard enough that night to know her father was tangled in things that would rot her whole world if the truth ever reached her, and I knew if I stayed, she would fight for me.
Fight her family. Fight the life she still believed in.
So I decided for both of us that leaving was cleaner than making her choose.
At twenty, that had felt like love. Now, with Priest holding Blue’s sonogram pictures and Lila’s sharp little smile still burning fresh in my head, it looked a hell of a lot more like fear.
Priest was still talking, and I forced myself back into the room. “It’s time you tell her,” I said.
His eyes narrowed slightly. “Tell her what?”
We both knew. I let my head rest against the pillow for a second before answering, because pain had turned every sentence into work and this one mattered enough to spend the breath.
“Where those rules came from.”
Priest said nothing.
“The parts you locked down,” I went on, quieter now, “because you were scared of what you’d turn into if you didn’t.”
That hit. I could see it in the way Priest looked away and his jaw set.
“You didn’t close yourself off because you’re cold,” I said. “You did it because you saw what happens when a man like Joker gets power. Makes a family. Gets people he thinks belong to him.”
Priest’s fingers tightened around the sonogram pictures.
“You didn’t want to build a life just to poison it,” I said. “Didn’t want to wake up one day and realize you’d turned into the thing you ran from.”
The room seemed smaller after that, the machines louder against the quiet. Priest still didn’t look at me, but he was listening.
“She deserves to know that,” I said. “Maybe not every detail. Maybe not every scar. But the truth of why you’ve been holdin’ your breath your whole damn life.”
Priest swallowed hard. “She already knows I don’t do easy.”
“That ain’t the same as knowin’ you were tryin’ to be better,” I said. “Or that every rule you made was you swearin’ you’d never be him.”
Priest looked up then. Really looked. “You think she’ll understand?”
The question struck deeper than I wanted because I knew it wasn’t really about Blue. Or not only Blue. It was about what happened when you handed a woman the ugliest truth about yourself and waited to see whether she still stayed.
I thought of Lila, eighteen and trembling but brave enough to love me before I had earned a damn thing. Then I saw the woman she was now, walking into my hospital room tired and angry while still unable to keep the care out of her voice.
“I think,” I said slowly, “that if you don’t trust her with the truth, you’re still lettin’ Joker make your choices.”
The words landed and didn’t move.
Then they turned around and came for me.
I had done the same damn thing. Not with Priest’s rules or in his exact way, but with fear, old rot, and everything I had heard about Lila’s father and the world that would open if I stayed.
I made the choice alone and ran before she could stand inside the truth with me and decide for herself what she wanted to do with it.
I had called it sparing her. Maybe some of it had been.
Maybe some of it had also been me refusing to trust Lila to survive the truth of her own life.
That sat ugly in my gut.
The monitor hummed steadily between us while Priest looked down at the sonogram photos again, quieter now, and I could almost see the weight shifting inside him. “You already know what you want,” I said after a while. “That ain’t the problem.”
Priest didn’t answer.
“The problem,” I went on, my voice roughening as fatigue tugged at me again, “is tryin’ to love somebody without lettin’ ’em see where you came from.”
His jaw tightened around the next breath. Pain moved through me too, a dull throb beneath my ribs, but I kept going.
“You survived somethin’ most men don’t. And instead of lettin’ that make you cruel, you tried to make yourself...” I searched for the word and found it. “Contained. Predictable. Safe.”
Priest huffed once, humorless.
“Nothin’ wrong with that,” I said. “Except you kept the wrong things out.”
I looked toward the floor and then back at him, my own hypocrisy sitting plain between us now.
I could hand out advice from a hospital bed to one of the men I trusted most in this world while my own girl walked in and out of my room like every glance between us carried live current.
I still had no damn clue how to begin fixing what I had done to her.
“But you don’t build a future by pretendin’ the fire never touched you,” I said. “You build it by showin’ the scars and trustin’ the right person not to flinch.”
Priest turned his face toward the door, toward anything that wasn’t me seeing too much. I let the silence stretch for a moment before calling him back.
“Priest,” I murmured.
He stopped.
“You’re not him,” I said. The words came quieter now, exhaustion starting to win, but no less true for it. “You never were. What you built for us, with us, proves that.”
Priest didn’t look back.
“I saw the way she looks at you,” I added. “She saw you without the armor. Saw the parts you keep locked down.”
His jaw shifted once.
“And she didn’t flinch,” I said. “Didn’t try to fix you. Didn’t ask you to be anybody else.”
I watched him absorb that, his shoulders carrying more than stitches, blood loss, and near misses could account for. The meds were pulling harder at me now, blunting the edges of the room, but I needed him to hear the rest.
“If you keep livin’ like you might be him,” I finished, my voice fading a little as the meds started dragging me under again, “you’ll lose the only person who ever saw you bare and chose you anyway.”
The room went quiet after that, full without being tense or easy.
I let my eyes drift shut and saw Lila immediately because of course I did.
Eighteen by the lake, then thirty-five in scrubs, side-eyeing Nomad like she could cut him in half with one sentence.
Lila beside my bed telling me not to push, then leaving and somehow taking half the air with her.
I had told Priest to follow the rules. Show up. Tell the truth.
Good advice.
Advice I had never followed myself.
The irony was bitter enough to taste, but maybe that had to change.
Maybe waking up hadn’t only been getting dragged back into pain, machines, and questions I didn’t want.
Maybe it had also left me wrecked enough to finally see that whatever noble story I had told myself about leaving Lila had rotted through years ago.
The reasons had been real. The fear had been real.
So was the damage.
If I wanted any chance now, it couldn’t be built on disappearing again or deciding for Lila what she should know. I would have to stand still for it, tell her the truth, and let her hate me if that was what she needed.
Let her choose.
The thought scared me worse than the bullets had. It also felt like the first honest thing I had allowed myself to want in years.
When I finally opened my eyes again, Priest was still there, quiet and holding Blue’s sonogram pictures like they were a promise and a threat in equal measure.
I almost smiled.
Yeah.
I knew that feeling too.