Bennet Sullivan is Michael Bennett.
He has known who I am since the moment I walked through his door.
He has knownevery single thing, and I have known nothing. He has been watching me from inside that knowledge this entire time and I have been—
Was all of this revenge? Not like I wouldn’t deserve it. But my heart is breaking apart, nonetheless.
The bathroom door is right there. I stand. My legs cooperate marginally. I put the frame back exactly where I found it, trying to remember the precise angle, and I walk into the bathroom and close the door behind me and grip the edge of the counter.
I feel like I can’t breathe.
I run the cold water and splash it on my face. I take deep pulls of air that don't feel like they're reaching my lungs properly.
I need to know. I need to know with certainty that this isn't my guilt conjuring something that isn't there. That I haven't spent so many years carrying Michael Bennett around that I'm now seeing him in the face of every tall, dark-haired man who is inexplicably cruel to me.
I open the bathroom door and walk out of the bedroom. My feet carry me down the hall on their own, because I don’t feel like I’m controlling any part of my body at the moment.
Bennet —Michael— is cleaning up the last of our carpet picnic, his back to me. He hasn't heard me come out. He's stacking the empty bottles into the bucket with the unhurried ease of someone who doesn't know the world just shifted on its axis in his bedroom.
"Michael?"
It comes out barely above a whisper.
He just...freezes.
Every part of him. His hands, his shoulders, his breath. Like someone hit pause on him from the inside.
His eyes shut. His fists close at his sides.
"Blaire." he says my name but doesn't move an inch, doesn't turn around, just holds completely still with his back to me like he's deciding something.
"Michael?" Louder this time. My voice wobbles on it and I don't try to stop it.
He sets down what he's holding slowly. Stands. And then he turns and crosses to the sofa and sits on the edge of it and finally looks at me. His face is open in a way I have never once seen it in all the weeks I've been in this building, every wall gone, every carefully constructed piece of Bennet Sullivan stripped back.
What's underneath is someone I recognize.
"Yeah, Blaire." His voice is very quiet. "Michael."
MICHAEL
I was stacking the last few of the alcohol bottles into the bucket when I heard her come out of the bathroom.
I didn’t turn around. I kept moving, kept my hands busy to give her a second to collect herself because I knew she needed that minute and I wanted her to have it.
"Michael?"
My name barely made a sound leaving her lips, but it reached me like a shockwave from the center of the universe.
I stopped moving.
Everything stopped. My hands, my breathing, every carefully maintained mechanism I've built over ten years to keep Michael Bennett exactly where I put him — gone, in the space of one word spoken barely above a whisper.
The picture frames. I shut my eyes, my fists clench at my sides. The fucking picture frames. She knows.
I can feel her standing behind me and I can’t turn around. Not yet. My body is deciding something my brain hasn't caught up to. Ten years of construction and it comes down to this moment.
"Blaire." Her name comes out of me like something I didn't mean to say out loud.
