22 #2
“I don’t need to understand.” His voice rose for the first time. “I know what you did to Ryan. Looking at your face, you know what you did too, and that pisses me off even more.”
My lungs seized. Bliss reached toward me again, but I folded forward before she could touch me, my hair falling around my face while I struggled against the panic closing my throat.
“I tried to go after him.”
“After he left.”
“I went to his apartment.”
“After he left.”
“I told him I chose him.”
“After he fucking left,” Briggs said through clenched teeth.
“Enough,” Cade ordered.
Briggs finally looked away from me.
Cade’s voice remained low, but the authority inside it changed the entire room. “This isn’t the time.”
Briggs worked his jaw as he stared at the floor. His hands opened and closed once before he reached for the backpack still hanging from one shoulder.
“Yeah.” He released a hard breath. “I’m getting out of here.”
Cade’s eyes narrowed. “Where are you going?”
“Flint.”
My head lifted.
“You’re going to Ryan?” Cade asked.
“Yes.”
“He told us he wanted to be alone.”
“He also told us he can’t breathe without feeling her beneath his skin.”
The words cut through me, and my fingernails dug into the couch cushion.
Easton stepped forward. “I’ll come.”
Briggs shook his head immediately. “No.”
“Why the fuck not?”
Briggs looked at him, and something silent passed between them. It was too serious for the men I knew, stripped of hockey, jokes, and every easy layer they used to keep their deepest wounds private.
“You know why I’m going.”
Easton’s expression shifted first, followed by Cade’s.
Neither argued.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Briggs looked at me. “I ain’t telling you shit.”
I recoiled.
“Briggs,” Bliss said quietly.
“No.” He adjusted the strap on his shoulder. “Ryan gave her more of himself than he gives anybody, and she used the worst thing that ever happened to him to prove he was right about trusting people. She doesn’t get the rest of him from me. She can have El Cuchillo.”
“I didn’t know.”
“That’s the point, Charm. You didn’t know because you were too busy making sure he could fit into your life without anybody finding out he was there.”
“That isn’t fair.”
“Neither was asking him to love you in secret.”
The words ripped through me.
Briggs started toward the door before stopping beside the couch. He looked down at me, and for a moment, the anger in his face eased enough for me to recognize him.
“I love you,” he said. “I’m disappointed as fuck in you, and I don’t know if you can fix this. I can’t be your friend tonight because I’m his first, always.”
My mouth trembled.
He tipped his head, the smallest trace of his usual warmth entering his voice. “I’ll try again tomorrow, all right?”
A sob caught in my throat as Briggs turned before I could answer. He crossed the room and held one hand toward Cade. Cade clasped it and pulled him into the half embrace the guys used when anything more would require acknowledging they had feelings.
“Call me when you get there,” Cade said.
“I won’t.”
“Briggs.”
“I’ll send a tasteful selfie.”
“Call me.”
“Fine.”
Easton caught Briggs’s hand next and pulled him in, slapping his back once. “Don’t let him do anything stupid.”
“I’m planning to help him do something stupid in a controlled environment.”
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.”
The faint brightness disappeared from Briggs’s face when he looked at me one last time. Then he left.
The door closed behind him, and the apartment became too quiet.
I stared at the place where he had stood.
Briggs loved everyone loudly, indiscriminately, and with the emotional boundaries of an overly friendly dog.
I had watched him forgive insults before the other person finished delivering them.
I had seen him welcome strangers into our lives because they looked lonely at a party.
Tonight, Briggs couldn’t be my friend.
The knowledge found every weak place inside me and pushed.
“I’m sorry.”
Bliss sat beside me again, but she didn’t wrap me in her arms this time. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I wanted to.”
Aura shook her head. “Stop saying that.”
I looked at her through swollen eyes.
“You wanted to want to tell us,” she said. “That isn’t the same thing.”
“I was scared.”
“Of us?”
“Of it becoming real.”
Bliss’s voice softened. “It was real whether you told us or not.”
“I know that now.”
“You knew it then,” Easton said.
Aura shot him a look. “Ease up.”
“No, Briggs was right about one thing. She knew.” Easton sat on the edge of the coffee table across from me, his forearms braced over his thighs. “Maybe she couldn’t admit it to everyone else, but she knew exactly how serious Ryan was.”
“I did.”
“Then explain it.”
I stared down at the red marks crossing my palm. “I don’t know how.”
“Try.”
The command was quieter than anything Ryan had said to me that night.
I closed my fingers to hide the marks. “My parents don’t yell.”
Cade remained near the door. “What does that mean?”
“They don’t have to.” I wiped my cheeks, but the tears kept coming.
“My father can ruin an entire part of my life without raising his voice. He asks questions until everything I believe starts sounding childish. Then my mother gets sad because I’ve upset him, and somehow I end up apologizing before I even understand what I did. ”
Bliss nodded slowly. “I’ve seen it.”
Easton looked at her. “When?”
“Every day since we were twelve.” Bliss pulled one leg beneath her on the couch. “Charm can be happy, then one of them enters the room or calls her. By the time they leave or she hangs up, she’s apologizing for something she didn’t know was wrong five minutes earlier.”
Aura lowered herself onto the arm of the chair. “They don’t give orders. They make disappointment feel like a consequence.”
“They love her,” Bliss said. “I think they genuinely believe they love her.”
“They love the version of her that makes them comfortable,” Aura corrected.
“I don’t know how to be somebody else around them.
” My hands shook in my lap. “I can think of everything I want to say before I see them. I practice it. I hear Ryan’s voice telling me I’m trained, and I believe I’ll be different the next time.
Then my father looks at me that way, and I feel like I’m twelve years old again. ”
Cade finally moved away from the door. “What happened when you were twelve?”
The question sent my brother’s face through my mind. Charlie laughing behind me in the pool. Charlie reaching across the console to turn up the music because he knew it would piss off our dad. My mother screaming when the police came to the house.
I shoved the memories back into the locked place where they belonged.
“Nothing I want to talk about tonight.”
Cade studied me long enough that I knew he noticed the evasion, but he let it remain.
“My father knows exactly how to make me feel like everything will disappear if I disappoint him,” I continued.
“My tuition, my future, my mother, and their love. He never says all of it at once because he doesn’t have to.
I hear it anyway, and tonight he threatened those very things if I chose Ryan. ”
Easton rubbed both hands over his face. “Fucking shit.”
“He threatened to cut her off once because she changed her concentration,” Aura told him. “Then he denied threatening her because he never used those exact words.”
“He asked whether I understood how difficult it would be to finish school without their support,” I whispered.
“That’s a threat,” Easton said.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
I flinched, and he noticed, but he didn’t take it back.