Marco hasn’t moved. He’s staring at me wide-eyed, the kind of stunned expression people get when they’ve just watched a magic trick and can’t decide if they’re impressed or horrified.
He doesn’t interrupt. He doesn’t demand. He just waits, patient and steady, like he’s giving me the one thing I’ve been refusing to give myself. Time.
I swallow hard, lower the phone, and stare at the carpet. There are a hundred ways to keep lying. There are a hundred ways to shove this back into the box I’ve been suffocating in for two years.
But Miles’s voice is still ringing in my head. They all know what today is. The secret is cracking, and I am so tired of holding it.
My voice comes out quiet, raw. “Today is our two-year wedding anniversary.”
Marco blinks. Then blinks again. Then his mouth opens. “The fuck?” he says, like the words physically hurt him. “Two years? How? The fuck?”
A laugh escapes me, small and bitter and shaky. “Yeah.”
He runs a hand over his face like he’s trying to wipe the sentence away. “Ollie. What the actual?—”
“I know,” I whisper.
He stares at me, then points vaguely at my bruised eye, the hotel room, the scattered clothes like he’s trying to assemble the puzzle with pieces from the wrong box. “You’re married. To Rafe Ortiz.”
“Yes.”
“Two years.”
“Yes.”
“Secretly.”
“Yes.”
Marco makes a sound that might be a strangled laugh or a near-death experience. “How. The fuck.”
I take a breath. Then the story spills out. Not every detail. Not the first touch, not the vows, not the soft private moments that belong only to us. But enough. Enough that it becomes real in the air between us.
“You know we met in college,” I say, voice unsteady. “Same campus. I knew who he was. Everyone did. Steel Saints were local then. Just… loud guys with big dreams and a shitty van.” I swallow, and my chest aches. “It started as friendship,” I continue, because it has to. It has to make sense. “Hanging out. Helping each other. He was living with the band. I was on campus. It was… easy.”
Marco watches me like he’s afraid I’ll stop.
“Then it wasn’t easy,” I say, voice roughening. “Then it was him. And it was me. And it was stupidly right and terrifying, and I didn’t have language for it.”
Marco’s face shifts, something soft breaking through the shock. “You fell,” he says, like he’s confirming something obvious.
I nod once. “Hard.”
“And you got married,” he says, incredulous again.
I take a second before I trust my voice. “Before the draft, during March Madness in Vegas. We were already… us. We just—” I shake my head, still unable to believe it sometimes. “We did it. Just us and the guys, his bandmates. Just… us. Makeshift rings and promises, like idiots.”
Marco stares. “Like romantics.”
I bark a short laugh. “Like idiots.”
“You’ve been living like this for two years?” he asks, voice lowering. “Hiding a whole marriage?”
“Yes,” I say. The word tastes like defeat.
He leans back against the wall, arms crossing, eyes narrowed like he’s doing mental math. “Okay,” he says slowly. “So last night—Kirk?—”
I nod, jaw tightening. “He saw Rafe in the crowd.”
