Chapter 13 I Believe You
Luke
I’d gone for a run to get out of my own head, and it hadn’t worked.
I ran down to the lake and back, hard, farther than I meant to, and I came in the door as wound up as I’d left.
Ryan wasn’t home. He’d told me that morning, in a voice that didn’t leave any room to argue it, that we needed to talk today and it couldn’t keep waiting, and then he’d gone out on some errand he didn’t explain and made me promise I’d be here when he got back.
He hadn’t said what the talk was. He hadn’t said where he was going.
He’d kissed the side of my head on his way out, like he wasn’t sure I’d let him, and gone.
I stood dripping with sweat in the front hall with my pulse still going strong with no sign of going down.
There was too much standing between us for me to guess what today’s discussion was about.
Any one of the silences or lies could be the thing he’d decided to tackle, and the not-knowing was the worst of it.
What scared me wasn’t the talk. It was what it might cost. I loved him, and we hadn’t had that very long out in the open, and every day since Adam came back I’d felt him getting a little further from me. I was scared today was the day I lost him for good.
I got in the shower to wash the run off and give my hands something to do. Too bad it didn’t settle me either.
More than I wanted to know what he’d been carrying all day, I wanted us back.
The real us, not the two careful people we’d been doing an impression of, handing each other files and being polite in our own home.
Whatever today turned out to be, I was done lying to him.
If he was about to hand me something hard, he was going to get the truth back, all of it, today.
I’d decided that much before I turned the water off.
I got out, dried off, and dressed. Jeans, an old t-shirt, bare feet. I’d just pulled it on when I heard his key in the lock.
I came out of the bedroom. He was just inside the door with his coat still on, stopped there like he hadn’t decided how far into the room to come, and he looked up at me, and I froze.
He’d been crying.
Not right then. But his eyes were red-rimmed and his face was blotchy and raw.
My heart dropped.
Every instinct I had went straight to him. I didn’t think about the talk, or the thing I’d spent all day working up to, or any of the places my head had gone on the run. I crossed the room and pulled him in.
He came into me without a word, his face against my neck, his hands fisting in the back of my shirt. I could feel how hard he was holding himself together. The second I had him against me I felt how much I’d gone without it. I put a hand in his hair and kept him there.
“Hey,” I said. “Are you alright?”
He nodded against me, and I didn’t believe it.
“What happened? Ryan? Talk to me.”
He pulled back enough to look at me, and he smiled. Tired, and real. Whatever I’d been dreading, that smile wasn’t it? “It’s nothing,” he said. “I’m okay, I promise. I’ll explain all of it, everything, I just need a minute.”
He had something ready behind the smile, and it was costing him to hold it, and I knew that look. If he started, I’d never get mine out.
“Then before you explain anything,” I said, “let me go first. I’ve got something I have to say, or I’ll lose the nerve.”
He went still. Then he nodded and let me have the room.
“Okay,” he said.
I went into the kitchen. I wanted something solid under my hands, because the rest of me wanted to go back to holding him and never say the thing I had to say.
Saying it might cost me this, the two of us, the thing I’d just been so scared of losing.
But I already knew what keeping it cost. So I put the counter between us and made myself look at him.
“You were right about Adam.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I know. I stood right here and told you there was nothing to be afraid of, and I called you jealous. I told you he was the past and you were the one in my arms and you needed to let it go.” I held his eyes while I said it. “I was wrong and I’m sorry. That’s the first thing I wanted to tell you.”
Something crossed his face that I couldn’t read. It wasn’t relief, which was what I’d steeled for. It was closer to the look he got when the news turned out worse than everyone said.
“Luke…” he started.
“I’m not done,” I said, trying to keep my voice level. “There’s a second thing. Wait for me to finish before you react, because it’s going to land wrong and I need you to hear all of it.”
He put both hands flat on the counter and waited. He could go still and wait a person out. Half his interviews were won that way. I’d watched him do it to hard men across a table, and I’d never once had it turned on me at home.
I told him about the coffee meet with Adam.
I kept it short. Adam catching me at the doors that evening, asking for ten minutes off the property. Me saying yes because I wanted it over with. The place on Broadview that used to be ours. The whole careful hour of him telling me he knew what he’d done. Him asking, at the end, if I missed him.
“I meant the no,” I said. “I want that clear. There was never a second in that room where I wanted him back. I told him what he cost me, and I told him we were colleagues now and nothing else, and I meant every word.”
Ryan nodded, small. He hadn’t moved otherwise.
“On the way back, we walked together to the corner,” I said.
“The light changed and I stepped off the curb without looking, still half distracted. And his hand came out and grabbed my arm and hauled me back hard to save me from a car, and before I had my feet under me he had his other hand behind my head and his mouth on mine.”
Ryan’s jaw tightened.
“I shoved him off. Hard.” My throat had started to close up.
I kept on through it. “There was never a chance I’d go back to him, let alone kiss him.
I don’t have proof, but the more I’ve turned it over, the more it feels like he set the whole thing up.
The car, the grab, all of it, just to get his mouth on me for a second.
I hate that it happened. I hate that I let him get that close. ”
I pushed on to the last of it.
“And I came home that night, and I looked at you and I decided not to tell you any of it because I was afraid that it would finish breaking what remained of us. Because I wanted you back more than I wanted to be honest about what happened.” I stopped.
“Which is the exact thing I did to you before. Deciding for you what you could handle. I knew it while I was doing it and I did it anyway. I’m sorry. ”
I’d meant to stop there and let him have it, whatever came. I’d braced for the version of his face I figured I’d earned, cold and shut, the way it had gone during the worst of the silence. I stood there and waited for it.
For a second it looked like I’d get it. Something crossed his face and went dark, and he looked away from me, down at the counter, and his jaw worked like he was holding something down. The kitchen went dead quiet. I was certain I’d finally done it, certain this was the end of us.
Then he breathed out, slow, and got hold of whatever it was. When he looked up it had cost him to put it down, but it was down.
He came around the counter, didn’t say one word about the kiss. He put his hand flat on the side of my neck, and he looked at me like I was the one who’d been hurt.
“You, deciding for me what I could handle, knowing it and doing it anyway.” His thumb moved once at my jaw. “I’ve done the exact same thing to you. So whatever you were expecting from me, you’re not getting it. I haven’t got the standing.”
“It wasn’t you, Ryan. It’s my fault. I must have let him on somehow, gave him ideas or false hope. I let him get close enough to…”
“There was no car.”
I stopped. His hand was warm on the side of my neck and I didn’t want him to take it away.
“There was no car,” he said again, quiet and certain. “He didn’t pull you back from anything. Nothing came down that street. He set the whole thing up, the corner, the grab, all of it, and you suspected it was wrong the second it happened, and you were right. You didn’t imagine one thing.”
I heard the words and I couldn’t make them fit anywhere.
“How do you know that?”
He took his hand back, slow, shrugged out of his coat and dropped it over the back of a chair, and stepped around to his side of the counter again. I watched him decide to tell me, and what it took out of him to start.
“Somebody slid photographs under our door while we slept.” He said it flat, watching my face.
Then he gave me the rest of it, low and steady.
The pictures of that corner, of the kiss.
That he’d never believed them, not for a second, that he’d known it wasn’t real before he was done looking.
That he’d kept them from me and been working it on his own since.
That there was more than he could put on the counter tonight, and he’d show me all of it right now if I wanted, and I didn’t have to take one word of it on faith.
I stood there still feeling where his hand had been on my neck, wanting it back.
Once, I’d have needed to see it. Every photograph, every date, every reason, laid out where I could check it, because I’d given everything to a man who was good with words and I’d promised myself I’d never take another one on faith.
That promise had run my whole life since.
It was half of why I kept everyone at a distance.
But the man in front of me wasn’t the one I’d learned to guard against.
“I don’t need to see it,” I said.
He blinked.
“I believe you.” It came out rougher than I wanted. “I don’t need the pictures, Ryan. I know what he is now. I’ve known longer than you have, I just never let myself turn around and look at it.” I had to stop for a second. “So no. I don’t need proof. I believe you.”