The home renovation show drones on. Someone’s installing subway tile.
“But naming it now isn’t the right time… not while my girlfriend gets her tubes tied and my—” He stops, giving me a pained look.
“Your what?”
His eyes find mine and stay. “That’s exactly the problem. I know the answer. And it scares the shit out of me.”
He sits there, leg still bouncing, carrying all that tension with nowhere to put it.
“I grew up thinking men didn’t touch,” I tell him. “Not like we do. Not with tenderness or want or anything beyond violence or sports. My stepdad...” I pause, choosing my words carefully. “He carried everything alone. Never let anyone close enough to help. And when the weight got too heavy, he didn’t reach out. He just... stopped.”
Chris goes still.
I don’t talk about this much. Not because it’s a secret—just because most people don’t know what to do with it. They get uncomfortable, or they try to fix something that can’t be fixed, or they treat me like I’m fragile for the next six months.
But Chris doesn’t move. Doesn’t deflect. Just waits.
“I was sixteen,” I continue, and my voice comes out rougher than I intended. “Old enough to understand what happened. Young enough to think I should’ve been able to stop it.”
My eyes burn. I don’t fight it.
That’s the thing I learned, eventually. After years of therapy, after watching my mom rebuild herself one careful day at a time. The tears aren’t the weakness. Pretending they don’t exist—that’s what kills you.
“Wyatt—” Chris starts, something cracking in his voice.
“I’m okay.” I blink, feel the dampness on my lashes. Don’t wipe it away. “It was a long time ago. But I think about him sometimes. How different it might have been if he’d let someone in. If he’d known he could ask for what he needed.” I meet Chris’s eyes. “If he’d understood that wanting gentleness, wanting connection, wanting to be held—those things didn’t make him less of a man. They just made him human.”
Chris hasn’t looked away.
“Thank you,” he says quietly. “For telling me that.”
He’s quiet for a long moment before he says, “Can I say something back?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve done the work. Therapy, grief, everything. I respect the hell out of that.” He pauses, choosing his words the way I chose mine. “But sometimes I think your insight is its own kind of armor. You’ve got me figured out—you’ve got yourself figured out—but figuring everything out isn’t the same as sitting with it when it’s ugly and you don’t have answers.”
“I’m in the middle of it,” he continues. “I don’t have your answers. I don’t have it figured out. I just need you to stop trying to push me through it faster than I can go.”
He’s right. I overexamine and turn every raw feeling into an insight, and maybe that is my version of keeping distance. My version of armor.
“Okay,” I say. “That’s fair.”
The silence that follows isn’t tense. It’s something new. Both of us exposed, neither one fixed.
I stand up. He tenses. But I only move to the chair next to him.
“We don’t have to wait for Nina to be the bridge,” I say. “We can figure this out directly.”
He’s quiet for a long moment. “Yeah,” he says. “We can.”
His phone buzzes again. He glances at the screen.
“The arraignment?”
“They moved it up.” He looks at me, and I can see him bracing for the guilt trip.
“Go handle it.”
