“I don’t want to fight,” I say finally. “But I also can’t apologize for surviving.”
“I get it. You two were in hell together. I’d have wanted someone to hold on to, too.” He pauses, exhales through his nose. “Doesn’t stop the part of me that wants to be angryanyway. He’s my brother, and you needed him, and I can’t be jealous without being an asshole. Fuck, Max. I’m sorry. I’m trying to wrap my head around this.”
I study him, his grip on the wheel, the muscle ticking in his jaw. He’s not attacking, he’s admitting. That matters.
“I’m not mad at you,” he says finally, although the muscle in his jaw gives him away. “I’m just…jealous. And I’m glad that he was there for you but I hate that it wasn’t me.”
“But you saved me,” I say quietly. “Yougot me out of there. You brought me back.”
“Can I ask you something without it coming out wrong?”
“You can try,” I say, bracing.
He exhales. “How could you be with me after being with him?”
Yikes. The honesty of the question stings.
“Because…” I hesitate, searching for the words to explain exactly how confusing my feelings for all of them are. “Because you’re you, Ryder. Because I could never not want to be with you. I love Wyatt, I do, but that doesn’t take anything from what I feel for you. Being with him didn’t erase you. It never could.”
He sighs. “When I got you back, I didn’t even stop to ask what we were. I just—” He shakes his head, eyes fixed on the slick black ribbon of road. “I should have.”
“No.” The word is out before I can stop it. “Don’t say it like it was a mistake. It wasn’t. I missed you so much I couldn’t breathe. Being with you…” My voice falters. “It heals something inside me.”
For so long, sex had been something donetome. A transaction, a way to stay alive, to keep someone else calm. But with these men—first Jake, then Damian, then Ryder, and finally Wyatt, it has always been achoice.
I look down at my hands, then back out at the rain streaking past the window. “The love I have for all of you, it just…exists. I wish it didn’t feel like a crime to say that.”
He gives a low, humorless laugh.
“I’m sorry, Ryder.”
“Don’t apologize,” he says with a heavy exhale. “That’s not what this is. I’m not trying to be the man who makes you smaller just because I want you to fit in my hands.”
My throat tightens. “You’re not.”
His hand slips from the wheel, searching for mine. When he finds it, his fingers close gently.
The forest rushes past, colors bleeding together—flame, rust, gold. Alone they’d be fading, but together they burn brighter, a patchwork of resilience stitched out of ruin.
“It’s complicated,” I say with a sigh.
He squeezes my hand once. “Yeah,” he says. “But it’s us.”
We ride in silence for a long time, hands looped lightly together, and then finally the trees thin, street lights cropping up in their place, and ahead, a flicker of fluorescent light shimmers through the drizzle. The gas station is half-drowned in fog, one old truck parked by the pumps, the windows of the small store clouded.
Ryder slows, turning in beneath the overhang. The rain on the roof finally silences.
“Stay in the truck,” he says.
“No way,” I reply, unbuckling my seat belt.
His mouth twitches with the ghost of a smile, and he kills the engine, climbs out, and pulls his hood up. I follow, the damp cold breezing through my sweatshirt. Within seconds, the mist is clinging to my eyelashes. Ryder hoists the gas cans from the bed and I hold one steady for him as he fills it up, then we repeat four more times—him unscrewing the caps, me bracing the cans as he fills them.
When the last can is full, he twists the lid tight and sets it in the truck bed. “You coming in?”
I nod eagerly.
Inside, the air is warm and smells like old coffee. A small TV murmurs behind the counter. The clerk barely looks up as we come in. Ryder heads straight for the register, wallet already out, but I trail behind, scanning the narrow aisles—soda, chips, shelves of rainbow-colored candy. One thing about these men is that they do not know the fine art of self-indulgence. Every grocery run is like prep work for a military excursion: canned goods, dried food, nutrient-dense stuff with no taste that can be packed or carried.
