The bottom drops out of something inside me. I wait for the words to settle differently. They don’t.
“What the fuck did you just say?” I say slowly.
A few weeks ago, this man had me pinned against a wall with his mouth on my throat like he wanted to live there.
I actually laugh—short, disbelieving and fucking wounded.
“Oh. You’re serious.”
“I didn’t mean to mislead you about what this was. That’s on me. But this, what we agreed to, it was never going to be—”
“George.” My voice cracks upward hard enough to cut him off. “We’ve been sleeping together for months. We know each other well enough to read each other’s minds half the time. Fuck, you went to Seattle when I couldn’t go home, met my family. You looked at me like—” I stop myself before the sentence gets dangerous. “And now you’re acting like this was some temporary experiment that ran its course? I fucking get it. It was me who laid down the rules. I did say there shouldn’t be any…emotions involved. But…are you for real?”
“I’m telling you what it was, Lance.”
Was, as in past tense, like he already buried it before I even knew it was dying.
“Go back to Seattle. Handle your shit there,” his voice grim and low, almost as if he’s carving the words into stone. “You don’t need to stick around here trying to save a shop that might not even make it.”
I shake my head, throat tight. “That’s not the point. I already told you. I’m choosing us.”
He looks away for a second, jaw set, eyes squeezed shut like it physically hurts him to say it. “There’s no ‘us’ that fucking needs you blowing up your future. You don’t owe me anything.”
The words land like another dismissal, sharp and final.
“What the hell happened since I first left?” I demand, voice rising. “Was it because I stayed in Seattle longer than planned? I was trying to get back here as fast as I could. You saw how it was for me back there. I’ve always meant to come back.”
George sighs, glancing up at the ceiling like he’s searching for the strength to keep this wall up. When he looks back at me, his eyes are haunted but his voice stays cold and determined. “Of course I saw what it was like for you. I’m not a child, Lance. You’re even thinking about resigning from the hospital because you just have a lot of things going on over there now. You don’t need to be here. It’s that simple.”
“What was it for you?” I challenge, my chest hurting now—a deep, crushing ache. “You seem real comfortable writing all this off for somebody who’s supposedly just helping a friend. Are we not in this together, figuring shit out? I didn’t know this is just all about me.”
“I already knew,” he says.
“Knew fucking what?”
He meets my eyes, and his features harden, like a stranger beneath the face of a man I’ve known longer than almost anyone.
“I didn’t need to figure anything out for myself,” he says quietly. “I already had.”
Everything in me goes still. A cold, sinking weight moves through my chest and I hold onto the faint, desperate hope that this doesn’t mean what I think it means.
“I’ve got my own history, Lance. Never thought it was anybody’s fucking business, but since we’re apparently doing this now…” George scrubs a hand across his jaw. “You spend enough years packed onto ships with the same guys, sleeping ten feet from each other, living in each other’s pockets twenty-four hours a day, you start noticing shit. Things you’d rather not think too hard about.”
The office goes painfully tense. My eyes burn. He stares back at me and doesn’t flinch, or add anything to it. He lets the silence press between us like stone, spanning everything we were weeks ago and whatever this is now.
Then, clear as a fucking day, it dawns on me.
“You and Carter,” I choke out.
Even saying it aloud shreds something inside me, the last pieces of the past weeks falling into place and making me sick.
George pauses, the silence stretching painfully. His face twists with visible regret and old pain for a split second before he forces it out.
He fucking grunts.
One grunt, and it goes through me like something giving way.
I can’t say anything. I’m not angry. I’m not anything yet. I’m just a man sitting across another who has become the whole world to me, hearing something that has messed up everything I thought I knew.
