11. Hallie #2
"Stop it," I hiss, my nails digging into his forearm. "Tell him the truth. Tell him it's real."
But he pulls away from me, stands and faces my brother with his shoulders squared. "I shouldn't have agreed to it. You're right. It was a shitty thing to do."
"Damn right it was." Ryan takes a step forward, and I can see the violence brewing in the set of his shoulders, the way his hands keep clenching and unclenching.
"Ryan, please." I move between them, putting myself in front of Caius even though every instinct screams this is wrong, something's wrong, why isn't he fighting for us? "You don't understand. What Kyle overheard was from the beginning, but everything changed. We changed. This is real now."
"Real?" Kyle interjects, and god, I want to throw my wine in his smug face. "Come on, Hallie. A guy like that doesn't fall for a girl like you. He was doing you a favor."
The words hit like a physical blow, landing right in the soft vulnerable place where all my insecurities live. A guy like that. A girl like you.
"Shut your mouth," Caius snarls, and there's the fire I was looking for, the heat that makes my heart leap even as everything else falls apart around us. But it's directed at Kyle, not at saving us.
"Or what?" Kyle stands now too, pushing back from the table with theatrical aggression, and suddenly everyone's on their feet like dominoes falling in reverse, Ryan lunging forward, Mom gasping, Dad's chair scraping back, even quiet Aunt Linda rising with her hand pressed to her chest. Voices overlap in a cacophony of accusations and denials and shocked gasps that bounce off the dining room walls, making the crystal in the china cabinet rattle.
"Everyone calm down," my sister pleads, her voice climbing an octave as she reaches for Ryan's arm, but nobody's listening.
The carefully constructed facade of our family dinner has shattered completely, and all the ugly truth is spilling out across Mom's good tablecloth like red wine staining white linen.
"I want to know the truth," Ryan says, his eyes boring into Caius. "Did you catch feelings, or was this just you being a good friend helping out?"
The question lands in the sudden silence, and everyone waits. I wait, my heart hammering so hard I can feel it in my neck, my hands, my toes.
Caius looks at me finally, really looks at me, and there's so much in his eyes I can't parse it all. Regret, longing, something that looks almost like goodbye.
"It was a favor," he says quietly, his voice steady and emotionless. "Nothing more than that. Just helping out a friend who was in a bind."
The world tilts.
Everything around me, the concerned faces of my family, the wreckage of our dinner, the warm evening air, all of it seems to shift and slide sideways like I'm standing on a ship in rough seas.
My knees go weak, and I have to grab the table to keep myself upright.
The wood is solid under my palm, real and grounding, but nothing else feels real anymore.
Not the way he's looking through me instead of at me.
Not the careful blankness of his expression where just hours ago there had been heat and hunger and something I could have sworn was love.
"You're lying," I whisper, but the words come out thin and tremulous, threaded through with an uncertainty that makes me hate myself.
Because part of me, that damaged, wounded part that's always believed I wasn't enough, is already starting to believe him.
"Last night you said... you told me you loved me.
You said it when we were tangled together in your bed, when you were inside me, when you looked at me like I was the only thing in the world that mattered. "
His face remains impassive, carved from stone, every feature carefully arranged into an expression of absolute indifference.
The mask is perfect, impenetrable, and it terrifies me how easily he wears it.
"I said what you needed to hear," he replies, each word precisely measured, deliberately cruel in its calmness.
No. No, that's not possible. Nobody's that good an actor. The way he touched me, looked at me, worshipped every inch of my body like I was something precious and perfect and his—that wasn't fake. It couldn't have been fake.
"Why are you doing this?" My vision blurs with tears I refuse to let fall, hot and stinging behind my eyes, threatening to spill over and prove just how completely he's shattered me.
I blink hard, determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing me break, even though we both know I'm already breaking, already falling apart right here on my parents' pristine patio with half the town watching.
"Why are you lying to him? To Ryan? After everything we shared, after what we did last night, after you held me and whispered those words against my skin like they were sacred—why are you standing there and telling my brother it meant nothing? "
"I'm not." The words are flat, lifeless, delivered without even a flicker of emotion crossing his features. He doesn't elaborate, doesn't explain, just lets those two syllables hang in the air between us like an executioner's blade.