36. Lance #2
He meets my eyes, and his features harden, like a stranger beneath the face of a man I’ve known longer than almost anyone.
“I didn’t need to figure anything out for myself,” he says quietly. “I already had.”
Everything in me goes still. A cold, sinking weight moves through my chest and I hold onto the faint, desperate hope that this doesn’t mean what I think it means.
“I’ve got my own history, Lance. Never thought it was anybody’s fucking business, but since we’re apparently doing this now…
” George scrubs a hand across his jaw. “You spend enough years packed onto ships with the same guys, sleeping ten feet from each other, living in each other’s pockets twenty-four hours a day, you start noticing shit.
Things you’d rather not think too hard about. ”
The office goes painfully tense. My eyes burn. He stares back at me and doesn’t flinch, or add anything to it. He lets the silence press between us like stone, spanning everything we were weeks ago and whatever this is now.
Then, clear as a fucking day, it dawns on me.
“You and Carter,” I choke out.
Even saying it aloud shreds something inside me, the last pieces of the past weeks falling into place and making me sick.
George pauses, the silence stretching painfully. His face twists with visible regret and old pain for a split second before he forces it out.
He fucking grunts.
One grunt, and it goes through me like something giving way.
I can’t say anything. I’m not angry. I’m not anything yet. I’m just a man sitting across another who has become the whole world to me, hearing something that has messed up everything I thought I knew.
My mind goes blank. My chest understood it before my brain did, and now the rest of me is just here in the rubble, waiting to catch up.
“Did you, at any point, think of telling me?”
My voice comes out strange, scraped thin.
What’s left is just the raw ache of having made myself completely, unreservedly open to someone who was never as lost as I was.
“It’s not my business, of course, but did you even consider that it might have mattered for me to know, before I went and laid myself bare before you?
Knowing you…have always been with Carter at work, almost every single day of your damn life since—”
He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. Whatever’s sitting behind his teeth seems too goddamn heavy to get out.
His eyes slide past me instead, and I watch the weight of everything he never told me finally hit him all at once. He looks pinned there by it, caught between guilt and whatever excuse he can’t force himself to say out loud.
And the fucked part is it still gets to me.
I’m sitting here feeling something crack open right through the center, and I still can’t stop watching his face for damage too. Still can’t stop caring whether this is hurting him as badly as it’s hurting me.
Then there’s a knock at the door. It swings open.
Carter comes in with a clipboard and stops the moment he reads the room. His eyes go from George to me and back again, and then he focuses on what he came in to do. He sets the clipboard on the edge of the desk. “Sorry, I need the insurance file for the Silverado.”
“Top drawer,” George says, as if nothing monumental had just been said.
Carter lifts the file without meeting anyone’s eyes. The three of us stay exactly where we are in a moment that drags itself out longer than it has any right to.
Then George says, “We’ve got history. He’s had feelings for me.”
It’s neither a question nor a statement. It’s more like a reminder, maybe a confession, as if I weren’t in the fucking room.
My head snaps toward George, not quite believing he’s doing this.
Carter looks like he’s taken a hit he didn’t see coming. He hasn’t moved, can’t seem to find words, looks blindsided. He actually looks fucking hurt.
“George, that was never—”
“It doesn’t matter.” George cuts across him, not cruel, just factual about something that exists whether anyone wants it or not.
His eyes return to me. “You remember when I talked about those months at sea? Same guys, same tight spaces, long stretches with nothing but each other.” He pauses. “He’s that good friend.”
I’m barely holding it together. “George.”
“I thought you two were…” Carter trails off. His face has gone red.
Pressure builds in my chest, and I know if I stay, I’ll shatter right here. I won’t give it that.
I force myself to look at Carter directly. My voice steadies through pure survival instinct. “We’re not.”
Carter struggles with it, jaw working. “Listen. It wasn’t like that between us. Yes, I’ve been…in love with him, but what he’s saying, it’s not the whole—”
The words hit me one after another, each finding somewhere new to split open. What the ever-loving fuck would I do with that information now?
I let out a short laugh that doesn’t sound human so much as exhausted. Hurt crawls up my throat so hard it burns.
“Man, I don’t think you need to explain,” I manage to say, forcing something close to a smile even while everything inside me collapses. I look between them, and it feels like driving broken glass deeper every second I stay standing here. “You two make sense.”
My voice almost breaks on the next part.
“We did some things. That’s all.” The pressure behind my eyes spikes so fast. My vision blurs for half a second. I blink hard, because I’m absolutely fucking not doing that here. “He was helping me figure myself out.”
The words taste humiliating now, cheap. It’s like I imagined an entire future out of scraps he never meant to give me.
I nod several times because if I don’t keep moving, I might actually fall apart in front of them.
“Man…” Carter starts, moving toward me.
I lift a hand before he can finish, because I don’t fucking think I can survive hearing the rest of that sentence. My chest already feels carved hollow enough as it is.
“It’s okay,” I say, my voice sounds hurt to my own ears. “We’re all good here.”
Silence slams into the room after that.
I walk out past Carter without looking back. The second I turn away, my eyes finally give out. I wipe at my face fast before either of them can see it.
I push through the shop door into the lot. The air out here hits cool and flat. I stand by my car with the keys in my hand and don’t get in yet. I just stand there, trying like hell to be the man who didn’t just walk into that office and hand George every fucking piece of me.
The truth doesn’t slam into me all at once. It creeps in slow and heavy, pressing into places I have nothing left to protect with.
Nobody warns you that sometimes, the worst part of a fallout isn’t losing the person. It’s knowing you handed them something real and honest, and they didn’t have the balls to hold onto it. They just let it slip through their fingers like it was nothing.
Once you’ve given all of yourself to someone, once they’ve really seen you, there’s no way to take it back. It stays out there, and you’re left standing with parts of you missing.
I wish I could say I’ve regretted telling him anything, but I don’t. Believing he’d fall with me...that might have been the mistake.