Wyatt’s hand finds mine under the table. “Neither of us is going anywhere.”
The tightness in my chest eases, not all the way, but enough. Enough to breathe. And breathing makes me think about all the other weight I’ve been carrying. About the pregnancy, the abortion, the shame I can’t seem to put down no matter how many people tell me I’m allowed to. I can tell Callie some of it, but not everything.
“I hate having secrets,” I say. “This job is going to be full of them—surveillance and cover stories and things I can’t tell you, or that you can’t tell me. The last thing I want is to poison whatever relationship we have with more lies.”
“What kind of relationship do we have?” Chris asks, looking directly at me.
It’s the question I’ve been avoiding. The one that sits at the center of everything we haven’t said.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “But I know I don’t want to lose either of you.”
“You won’t,” Wyatt says immediately.
“How can you be sure?”
“Because we’re here,” Chris says. “After everything—the wedding night, the weeks apart, the fight tonight—we’re still here.”
I look between them, paying closer attention, focusing on how they are together. The way they sit, not quite facing each other but not avoiding each other either.
“What happened between you two?” I ask. “Tonight, I mean. After the fight.”
They exchange another one of those looks that have become increasingly frequent over the course of this conversation.
Chris clears his throat. “We talked.”
“And?”
“And we realized we were both being idiots about a lot of things.”
“Such as?”
Wyatt shifts beside me, and I catch a flicker of uncertainty in his expression. Or maybe guilt. He looks like he’s about to speak when Chris beats him to it.
“There’s something we haven’t told you,” Chris says carefully.
My stomach clenches. “What kind of something?”
“After you left for LA,” Chris begins, then stops. Looks at Wyatt, who nods encouragingly. “I went to Denver. To your apartment. I thought maybe I could convince you not to take this assignment.” He scrubs the back of his neck. “I found Wyatt there instead.”
I picture it—Chris showing up unexpected, Wyatt packing my things. How that must have looked.
“We didn’t just talk,” Wyatt says quietly, gaze fixed on his coffee for a moment before he looks directly at me, hazel eyes intense as if he’s bracing for my reaction.
Understanding washes over me, followed by a jolt I wasn’t expecting. Not relief—hotter, more complicated than that. The image forms unbidden: Chris and Wyatt in my bed, tangled in sheets that still smelled like me.
Chris nods, confirming what I just imagined.
My pulse kicks up. After what the three of us shared that night, after watching them come apart for each other as much as for me—maybe this was inevitable.
But hearing it makes it real. Makes me remember the sounds Chris made when Wyatt was inside him. The way he buried his face against my flesh, the desperate arch of his spine.
“How do you feel about that?” I ask, falling back on familiar speech patterns because my analytical brain needs to process this before my emotional one can catch up, but my voice comes out lower than intended.
Wyatt chuckles, and I can’t help but smirk at being caught slipping into therapist mode. The humor breaks through the last of the uncertainty and I finally feel like myself again, though what remains is the building craving I have for them both.
“Confused,” Chris admits, his gaze flicking to Wyatt, then back to me. Despite not being in on the joke, he’s picked up on it, his own tension shifting to a deeper awareness. There’s heat in his eyes now, memory and want tangled together. “But not sorry.”
“And you?” I turn to Wyatt.
