Elena. It had to be Elena. She'd come back, she wanted to talk, she was ready to?—
I crossed to the door and opened it.
Bryan stood on my porch.
The evening light was behind him, casting his face in shadow, but I could see enough. The set of his jaw. The tension in his shoulders. He held himself tight and controlled, every muscle pulled taut like he was holding something back.
And his eyes.
Flat, hard, and full of something that went beyond anger and into territory I'd never seen from him before.
Heknew.
The thought landed like a stone in my gut. Elena had sent the footage, or Angela had finally told him… it really didn't matterwhich. Bryan knew, and now he was here, standing on my porch and looking at me like I was something he'd scraped off his shoe.
"Bryan," I said. "Listen?—"
His fist connected with my face before I could finish.
The pain exploded across my cheekbone, white-hot and immediate. I staggered backward into the doorframe, my hand coming up too late to block, stars bursting across my vision.
There was blood in my mouth, the taste of copper and salt.
He hit me again.
He hit my jaw this time. My head snapped to the side and I went down, knees cracking against the hardwood floor. The pain was everywhere now. Face, knees, hands bracing against the floor, everything ringing and throbbing and wrong.
I didn't raise my fists, nor did I try to defend myself. I didn't do anything but kneel there on my own floor and take it.
I deserved this. Every bit of it.
Bryan stood over me, breathing hard. His hands were clenched at his sides, knuckles already swelling and split from the impact. He was shaking, but not with fear or weakness. With the effort of holding himself back from doing worse.
"You were my friend."
His voice was low, barely controlled.
"You were in my house. You sat at my table. You drank my beer and watched the game on my couch and I—" He stopped, swallowed. "I lent you my fucking drill last month. You came over and borrowed it and I said sure, keep it as long as you need, because that's what friends do."
I looked up at him from the floor. Blood dripped from my lip onto the hardwood, and I could feel my eye already starting to swell.
"And while you had my drill in your garage," Bryan said, "you were fucking my wife."
The words hung there between us. Simple and devastating and absolutely true.
I had nothing.
No excuse, no explanation. No way to make this right, no combination of words that could undo what I'd done or fix what I'd broken.
"I'm sorry," I said.
The words came out thick and slurred. Blood in my mouth, swelling in my jaw. Pathetic.
Bryan just laughed., his voice hollow. No humor in it at all, just disgust.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "You are."
He looked at me for a long moment, at my pathetic bleeding shape, then he turned and walked off the porch. He didn't look back once.
