I don’t.
Because there is nothing to save here.
“You love her,” she repeats.
It isn’t mockery. It’s the sound of someone testing the shape of a truth they didn’t want to hear and discovering it refuses to get smaller in their mouth.
“Yes.”
The word leaves me quietly, but it lands hard.
For a long second, she doesn’t say anything at all. Her attention drifts past me, toward the stairwell, toward the part of the house where Octavia is still moving around upstairs completely unaware of what I’ve just handed one of the people she trusts most. Then her eyes come back to mine, something different in them now. Still wary. Still protective. But lessdismissive. Less willing to write this off as me being one more man with bad instincts and bad timing.
“And she knows that?” Cheyenne asks.
The question is softer than the others were.
“She does.”
That changes her too.
Not because she suddenly approves. But because now she has to reckon with Octavia in it, Octavia choosing, Octavia knowing enough to hear those words and not run. It takes this out of the category of him and places it squarely in the much more frightening category of them.
Cheyenne exhales slowly. When she speaks again, there’s a faint tremor of frustration in it, the kind that comes when a situation refuses to stay simple enough to hate cleanly.
“She is going to kill you for telling me.”
That almost gets a smile out of me.
“Probably.”
“And maybe me too.”
“Definitely maybe.”
That earns the smallest twitch at the corner of her mouth, gone almost before it’s there.
Then her face sobers again. “Love is not all that matters.”
“I know.”
The answer comes fast because she’s right, and because pretending otherwise would cheapen the one honest thing in this conversation.
“I know her past matters. Mine matters. Kadin matters because boys like him don’t let rejection pass quietly. Her parents matter. You matter. Maria matters. The mess matters. But what I feel for her isn’t the part I’m confused about.”
Cheyenne watches me with that same searching look. For the first time since I opened the door, I get the sense that she’s notjust trying to decide whether to trust me. She’s trying to decide what to do with the fact that she believes I mean it.
“If she changes her mind?” she asks.
“Then I stop.”
No hesitation. No pride. No bargaining.
The certainty of it seems to strike her harder than the declaration did.
Because men who want to possess don’t answer that quickly. Men who think love makes them entitled don’t leave room for refusal. Cheyenne knows that. I can see it register.
The porch goes quiet again after that, heavy with all the things neither of us can solve in one conversation.
