I bend to him, like I feel that I always am, and his hand comes up and hovers. “Don’t—” he starts and stops, swallowing a warning or a request. “What are you at?” he asks, his accent even more accented, like he’s angry that he wants at all. His pupils are wide and…terrified. His hands reach for me, drop from me, then reach for me again, and I can see the storm brewing inside him. A storm that’s proof of life.
He stands and pulls me to him, and I kiss him, and he kisses me back like my kiss is killing him but he doesn’t mind. A tiny groan in the back of his throat brings him back to life, and he pulls back, his hand hovering at my waist, unsure. He holds me, squeezes me there, then lets go. “What is this, Willow?” he asks, snapping, moving away from me.
I feel all the air sucked from my lungs, like he’s personally trying to hurt me with the question. Maybe he is. “I’m sorry,” I blurt, out of habit, and then shake my head. “No. I’m not. Don’t look at me like this is a thing happening to you. It’s happening to me.” I point at him viciously. “Y’all are doing it too.”
“We know,” Sean says softly.
“Do you?” My voice goes sharp. “You keep making plans and decisions and boundaries and exceptions and then you bring me soup and fold my laundry and check the locks and pretend you’re fine sharing the air with each other when you’re not.”
“That’s not fair,” Declan says, which is almost always what people say when a thing is true and hurts.
“Only children say ‘that’s not fair,’ Declan, grow up,” Rowan says, which is also true and unhelpful. He looks at the floor and then at me and it hits me all at once, bright and blinding. Cheyenne was right. They are all in love with me.
“Say it,” I tell them, and my voice drops into the center of the room with more authority than I feel. “Say the quiet part out loud so I’m not left guessing in my own house.”
Sean opens his mouth and closes it, startled, then nods like the only thing worse than saying it would be not saying it. He looks at me like the first time I saw the ocean—delighted and a little reverent. “I’m in,” he says simply. “Whateverthisis. However it looks.”
Declan doesn’t blink. “I want you safe,” he says, and the words are insufficient and true. He swallows. “And I want you.” The words cost him; I pay part of the price in the shiver that runs through my hands.
Rowan looks like he might unspool. He stares somewhere hard to the left of me, then drags his gaze back like it weighs something. “I don’t know how, at all,” he says, and I can’t tell if he means how to love me, how to share me, or how to speak. He adds, almost violently, “But I…” He swallows hard.
“I know,” I say, trying to feel like a soft landing place for the end of his sentence. Relief crosses his face, his brow softening.
“We can’t all be with her,” Declan says suddenly, the Irish thickening in his mouth when emotion yanks on it. “That’s not?—”
“That’s not how it works?” Sean tosses back, lifting an eyebrow, a boyish grin teasing at the corner of his lips.
Rowan’s laugh is soft and sharp at once. “It’s how it’s already working.” He shakes his head, meeting their eyes.
They stare at each other like mirrors they’d rather not stand in front of. Something ugly tries to crawl up my throat, some fear that I don’t deserve their love or that I’ve done something wrong to incite it, and I push it back down.
My voice shakes. “I feel something for each of you. I don’t know what it means or what it could be. I don’t have a map or a…crystal ball or…whatever I would need to understand this. But I’m not sorry for loving y’all back.”
Sean nods like he’s hearing something he’s been hoping to hear. “We can figure a version of?—”
“Not me. I can’t—” Rowan starts, and he steps back like the floor has shifted. He looks into me and through me and for me all at once. “Not tonight.”
It was too much tenderness. Too much truth. The room couldn’t hold all of it, and something had to break. Of course it was Rowan.
He’s almost at the door when I find my voice. “Rowan, stop.” He pauses. Doesn’t turn. “Stop pretendingyoudidn’t kiss me just as much asIkissed you. You feel this too. I don’t need you to be better than them,” I say into the narrow space between his shoulder blades. “I need you to bewiththem. Withus.”
For a second, I think he’ll turn around and say the perfect sentence to stitch us all together. He doesn’t. He opens the door and goes.
Declan swears very quietly. Sean sits down on the rug like his legs forgot how to be ladders. I take the breath Dr. Patel told me to take when the room tips.
No one moves for a long moment. The hum is still here, louder, weirdly steadier.
Declan breaks first. He kneels by the couch, not touching, eyes level with mine. “Do you want me to go after him?”
“No,” I say, tasting the truth of it. “I want him to want to come back. Me sending you doesn’t count.”
Sean scrubs his face with both hands, then looks up at me with that sideways brightness he’s never learned to hide. “I’m still in,” he says, gentle. “I’ll be in if it’s just me and you. I’ll be in if it’s you and him.”
I’m not alone. Sean is in, and Declan is in, and the hum is no longer something I’m imagining. It’s real, and it’s ours.
19
DECLAN
