Chapter 17 Rejection in #2
"Don't." I stand up. Find his shirt on the floor and pull it on because I need something between me and this room. "Give me a second."
He gives me a second.
He gives me several.
"I need you to understand something," he says.
"I'm listening."
"What I told Cole?" He stops. Starts again. "It wasn't about you. It was about protecting the situation. Keeping the information contained so that"
"So that what?" I turn around. "So that nobody finds out you had your brother's best friend in your bed?" I keep my voice even. I'm proud of that. "So that the secret stays clean?"
"So that you stay safe." His jaw is tight. He's sitting up, sheet at his waist, and he looks like a man who knows exactly what he did and why and is about to do the next wrong thing for the same right reason. "If Cole knows where you are, Graham knows. If Graham knows."
"I know the logic, Bishop." I cross my arms. "You've explained the logic. Several times. In several kitchens."
He goes quiet.
"Say what you're actually trying to say," I tell him.
He looks at the window.
I watch him get there. Watch the decision move across his face the way decisions do when someone has already made them and is just finding the words to make them official.
"This can't happen again."
There it is.
I stand in the middle of his bedroom in his shirt with the moonlight between us and feel those words land in exactly the place they were aimed at. Not my head, where logic lives. Lower than that. The place where I put things I actually let myself want.
"You need to go home," he says. "Or somewhere. Call someone not Cole, but someone. End the chaos. Let people know you're alive." He still won't look at me. "What happened tonight it shouldn't have happened. You came here in a vulnerable moment and I."
"Don't." Sharper than I intended. "Do not tell me this was a vulnerable moment."
"Delilah"
"I was not vulnerable." I take a step toward him. "I was clear. I was clearer in this room tonight than I have been about anything in the last five years. I told you exactly what I wanted and exactly what I wasn't asking for and you." My voice almost breaks on the next part. I don't let it. "You said yes."
"I know I did."
"And now you're saying no."
"I'm saying it was a mistake."
The word lands like a door closing.
I look at him.
At the man who held me like I was something worth holding. Who said my name in the dark the way it sounded like a statement. Who has been falling first since before I showed up in a wedding dress and calling it by every name except the right one.
I gave him my first everything.
Not just the physical all of it. The dock confession. The voice memo I recorded and deleted. The choice to stay. The choosing, over and over, in a house on a lake with men in black SUVs and deputies at the door and every reason to run.
He's calling it a mistake.
I know what's actually happening. He's not ending this because it was wrong. He's ending it because Cole called and he answered and the weight of what he's carrying came down and instead of standing under it he's going to dismantle this and call it protection. He's going to push me out the door and go back to punishing himself in this house because that is what Bishop Morgan does when something good gets close enough to cost him.
I know that.
Knowing it doesn't make it hurt less.
"Okay," I say.
He blinks. "Okay?"
"You want me to go. I'll go." I move to the doorway. "I'm not going to argue with a man about whether he wants me. I did that for two years with Graham and I'm done with it."
"That's not what this is."
"It is." I look at him from the doorway. "You're scared. Cole called and you panicked and now you're doing the thing you do protecting me right out of your life and calling it the responsible choice." My voice stays even. I don't know how. "I'm just not going to stand here while you do it."
He opens his mouth.
Closes it.
I go to the spare room.
The wedding dress is on the chair in the corner where I put it two nights ago, still facing the wall. I stand in front of it for a long moment.
The forty-three buttons. My mother's hands fastening them one by one while she told me how proud she was. The twelve-foot train I hauled through a marina parking lot in the dark. The silk that cost more than two months of my rent and never once felt like mine.
I am not putting it back on.
I am never putting it back on.
I open the lost-and-found bag yoga pants, a faded sweatshirt, both slightly too large and go to the bathroom with the door shut and the light off. I don't want to see myself in the mirror. I don't want to see the face of a woman who gave someone her first everything and got told it was a mistake before the sun came up.
I get dressed in the dark.
I fold his shirt when I'm done.
I don't know why I fold it. Habit, maybe. A lifetime of leaving rooms tidy even when the room earned the mess. I smooth it once, fold it twice, set it on the counter like it's something that deserves to be treated carefully.
It does. That's the problem.
I go back to the spare room and sit on the edge of the bed and look at the phone on the nightstand.
Twenty-three missed calls. All Cole.
I look at the window. The blinds still down. Outside, the sky has shifted the deep dark of the middle of the night giving way to the particular dark that comes just before morning. Not night anymore. Not yet day. The hour that belongs to no one.
This is mine, then.
I think about leaving a note.
I think about what I would say in it. That I understand. That I'm not angry or I am, but at the right things, not at him specifically, not for this specifically. That I know what he was trying to do and I know why and it doesn't help but it's true.
I don't write the note.
Because what I actually want to say is that he's wrong. That pushing me away isn't protection it's fear wearing protection's clothes. That the man who stepped six inches sideways to block Reyes's sightline, who plugged in my dead phone before I thought to ask, who said I gave him something worth protecting that man is not the same man who just told me to go home and end the chaos.
But I know which one he'll be in the morning.
And I know which one I can't stay for.
I get up.
I move through the house quiet as I know how. The kitchen the table, the mugs, the window looking out at the lake. The hallway. The front door, which he showed me how to open without the latch catching.
He showed me how.
I open it.
The morning air comes in cold and lake-damp and clean. The sky at the edges has gone pale gray, the darkness retreating, the day arriving whether anyone is ready for it or not.
I step outside.
I don't say goodbye.
I don't look back.
I just go down the path, past the hedge line, out to the lake road where the first gray light is spreading thin across the water and the town is quiet and everything that happened in that house is already behind me.
I walk.