"Yes."
Pickle sat with his hands still on the keyboard, watching me with an expression I couldn't read.
"I told myself I was buying time," I said. The confession I'd been holding for days finally found its way out. "Every clip I sent, I thought—if I stay on the project, I can influence the edit. I thought if I kept them happy, I'd have leverage to—"
"Did it work?"
Three words.
"No."
"So your strategy failed."
"Yes."
"And while it was failing—" Pickle's voice stayed level, "—you were still sending them footage of me checking Zamboni bolts because my brain won't shut up. Footage of me on my hands andknees fixing chair legs. Footage of me rubbing my chest when I think no one's looking."
The chest thing. I'd filmed that on day two. Hadn't understood what I was capturing until later—the private ritual he used to calm himself. I'd sent it anyway.
"Yes," I said.
"And you never asked me."
"No. I didn't."
"You had my face. My voice. My—" He gestured vaguely at his own body. "My stuff. The things I do when I'm trying to hold it together. And you never once asked if any of it was okay to share."
"I should have."
"Yeah." He stood from the chair. The last time he'd risen from a seat near me, he'd reached for my hand without thinking. Now his fingers stayed at his sides, curled slightly inward, holding nothing. "You should have."
The distance between us was like a mile-deep canyon.
"I was material," Pickle said. "That's what I was to you. Material you managed. Content you shaped. You decided which parts of me were worth showing and which needed protecting. You decided what I could handle knowing and when I was ready to know it."
Each sentence landed.
"You didn't treat me like a person who got a say in his own story. You treated me like a subject." His jaw tightened. "And the whole time—the whole time, Adrian—you were telling me to trust you. Holding me in your bed. Telling me I wasn't too much."
"I meant it."
"I know you meant it." His voice cracked for the first time—just barely. He caught it. Steadied. "That's almost worse. You meant every word, and you still made the choices you made. Yousaid you loved me, and you didn't trust me to participate in how you told my story."
The accusation was clear.
I could explain. I could talk about fear and patterns and a five-year-old wound that never healed right.
None of it would change what I'd done.
"You're right," I said. "About all of it. I managed you. I decided for you. I told myself I was protecting you, but—" I had to force the next words out. "It was control. The whole time."
His expression didn't soften.
"There's something else," I said. "Not a defense. Not an excuse. An option—if you want to hear it."
He didn't say yes or no.
He waited.
