18. Sage #2
“He does this thing,” he continues. “Makes his guilt the biggest thing in the room. His darkness. His monster. Like he’s the only one carrying weight.
” The words come out bitter. “And I fall for it. Every time. I step back so he can have the space he swears he needs.” His jaw tightens.
“Then I go right back to him when he wants closeness again. I’ve been doing that for years, Sage. ”
He stops at the window, pressing his palms flat against the frame.
“But that night . . . It was the first time it cost something I couldn’t get back.” His laugh is short and ugly. “I’ve been choosing his sadness over everything. My own time. My own wants. You. And I told myself the whole time that it was kindness. That he needed me.”
His voice cracks.
“So yeah. I’m furious. Not because he’s broken—we’re all fucking broken.
I’m furious because his self-hatred is so loud the rest of us can’t hear ourselves think.
And I keep letting it drown me out. I let it drown you out.
And then I almost lost you,” he says. “I don’t know how to forgive either of us for it. ”
I sit up, pulling the sheet to my chest. Not out of modesty—Micah has seen every inch of me and worshiped it all—but because I need something to hold on to.
“Micah.”
I don’t know what to do. For a second, all I want is to gather him back into bed, press close to his warmth, and tell him it’s not his fault, that it never was, that Eli’s sadness doesn’t erase what Micah did for me, what he has done every day since.
Instead, I sit with it. The admission. The mess.
All the truths we’ve been gathering like acorns, waiting for a winter that never ends.
He pushes off the window and sighs.
“You know Eli and I had a thing, right?” He glances at me and I nod.
“It was before us. Before . . .” He gestures vaguely around the house, all-encompassing.
“I don’t know what to call what it was. It wasn’t a relationship—we never called it that.
” He crosses his arms over his chest like he’s holding himself together.
“It was physical, mostly. After bad nights. After jobs. When the shit we’d done got too heavy to carry alone.
He’d come to my place, or I’d go to his, and we wouldn’t talk about it.
We’d just be. And then in the morning one of us would leave, and we’d act like it never happened.
” He exhales. “Then a few weeks later, we’d do it again. ”
He turns around. Leans against the window frame. The moonlight cuts across his chest and his eyes are bright and wet. He looks nothing like the steady, gentle man who held me through my nightmares. He looks like a man who’s finally stopped holding everyone else’s pain long enough to feel his own.
“It was comfort,” Micah continues. “That’s what I told myself. Just two people who understood each other’s damage finding a way to get through the night.” He looks at the ceiling. “But I’m not stupid, Sage. I know what it meant to me. And I know what it didn’t mean to him.”
“What makes you think it didn’t mean the same thing?”
“Because Eli doesn’t let things mean something. That’s his whole deal. He compartmentalizes—the teacher, the killer, the whatever-we-were. None of it touches the other parts. He keeps everything in separate boxes, and the box he put me in was labeled fuck buddy and that’s where I stayed.”
His voice doesn’t break. It doesn’t waver. It gets quieter.
“Then you showed up,” he says. “He wanted you so bad it scared him. I watched him want you, and I wanted you too, and for a while I thought—” He shakes his head.
“I thought maybe we could figure it out. The three of us. All of us. That maybe wanting the same person would be the thing that finally made him stop pretending.”
“But he ran instead.”
“Yeah. When he couldn’t stay away, he tried to make you run.
He just blew everything up because he’d rather destroy it than admit what it is.
” Micah rests his head against the wall.
“I’m furious because I know exactly why he did it.
I know the speech—the classroom, the kids, the monster-inside bullshit.
I’ve heard it. I’ve held him through it.
I’ve been the person he called at two in the morning when the walls got too thin, and I’ve listened.
I’ve told him it’s going to be okay, and then I’ve watched him walk away in the morning like I’m nothing. ”
He stops. The anger has burned down to embers now, and what’s left is grief.
“You love him, don’t you?” I ask.
The room goes very still. Even in shadow, he blushes down to his chest—maybe because I named it, maybe because he doesn’t know what it is I’m naming.
“Yeah,” he says finally. His hands drop to his sides, eyes flicking away, raw. “At least I thought I did. And maybe I still do. That’s the part that makes me angriest—that after everything he’s done, to you, to me, to all of us—I still can’t turn it off.”
I hold my hand out to him. For a second, he just looks at it. At me. Like I’m offering him something breakable and he hasn’t decided if he deserves to touch it.
Then he comes back.
He takes my hand and I tug him gently until he sits on the edge of the bed again.
I shift closer, getting out from under the covers and wrapping him in my arms from behind.
I press my cheek between his shoulder blades, my arms looped around his middle, and breathe in the heat and salt and bitterness rolling off him.
“I love him too,” I admit. “Still. After everything. I love him and I hate that I love him and I wear his hoodie to bed because it’s the only thing that makes the nightmares stop.
” I sigh heavily. “You know, every morning when I find the coffee he’s left me, I want to throw it at the wall but I can’t because I want it as well. ”
He huffs out a breath. “That about sums it up.”
My arms pull Micah tighter, anchoring him to the bed’s edge so he can’t get up and fold away his sorrow somewhere private.
He stays, which feels like a small miracle.
I kiss the place where his shoulder blades wing out under my cheek.
He lets out a shaky breath and tilts his head back.
I hook my chin over his shoulder and let my lips brush the stubble at his nape.
“You’re not nothing to him,” I say. “You never were. You know that, right?”
This time, he almost laughs. “You’re cute when you lie for my comfort,” he murmurs, but his hand comes up to touch my forearm, tracing the veins under my skin, following them like fault lines.
“I’m not lying. He can’t do what you do—he can’t say anything real unless it’s about someone else’s pain, or a lesson plan, or a rule.
But with you, it’s like—” I search for the right metaphor, come up empty.
“He gets close to you, it burns. I think he needs you more than you need him, but he’s pretty sure he doesn’t deserve you.
So instead he rations you, which is—” I bite the inside of my cheek. “Crueler than letting you go.”
Micah’s laugh is low and bruised. “Sounds about right.”
“It’s complicated,” I say.
“It’s fucked is what it is.”
“Also that.”
He turns in my arms and reaches for me. Pulls me against his chest and wraps himself around me, chin on top of my head, and for a minute we just sit there, holding each other, two people who love each other, and who both love a man who doesn’t know how to let himself be loved.
I pull back enough to look at him. “We don’t have to figure this out tonight.”
“I know.”
I run my thumb along the edge of his jaw, rough with stubble. “I love you, Micah.”
His eyes close on instinct, like he’s preparing for impact. “I love you too, baby girl.”
I kiss his cheek, then the side of his mouth, then work my way to the spot just below his ear that makes his whole body stutter.
He sighs, pulls me onto his lap, and when I sink down onto him this time, neither of us is chasing anything.
It’s slow. Unhurried. His forehead against mine, his hands steady on my hips, both of us breathing the same air.
No demons. No ghosts. Just us. And Eli’s jacket on the back of the door, where neither of us looks.