There is the smallest pause.
“He’s not the nicest guy,” Rory says. “That’s all.”
“That’s not what it looked like.”
He sets his end down carefully, straightening slowly.
“What did it look like?”
“Like you thought you had a say.”
His gaze settles on me, steady and unreadable. “I don’t,” he says evenly. “You can talk to whoever you want.”
“Good,” I reply, sharper than intended. “Because I will.”
Silence presses in between us, not hostile, just thick.
“I just don’t like the way he looks at you,” he adds after a moment, quieter now.
“And how exactly does he look at me?”
He hesitates. That is new.
“Like you’re… dessert” he says finally.
I feel irritation spark, but something more complicated coils beneath it. “You don’t get to do that,” I say before I can stop myself.
“Do what?”
“Disappear for years and then come back acting like you have to rescue me.”
His jaw tightens slightly.
“I know I don’t have to,” he says. “I was just making sure you weren’t uncomfortable.”
“I wasn’t.”
Another beat of silence.
He nods once, like he’s filing that away for future reference. “Right,” he says. “Then I misread it.”
There is something restrained about him now. A pullback. A quiet recalibration. “Look,” he adds, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck, “it’s none of my business. I know that.”
Do you? The question stays lodged behind my teeth.
Noah calls his name from the other side of the playground, breaking whatever fragile thing had been hovering between us. Rory glances over his shoulder, then back at me. “I’ll see you around,” he says easily, as if nothing here carried any weight at all. And then he walks away.
My phone buzzes in my hand before I’ve even processed the silence he leaves behind.
Hannah:That man is feral and pretending he’s not.
Hannah:I am exhausted for you.
I stare at the messages.
Across the playground, Rory laughs at something Noah says, but his shoulders look tighter than they did earlier.
He thinks he’s protecting me. He thinks he’s being decent. And I have no idea whether I’m more annoyed that he did it. Or more annoyed that he did it and then didn’t claim me for himself.
