My mind goes blank. My chest understood it before my brain did, and now the rest of me is just here in the rubble, waiting to catch up.
“Did you, at any point, think oftelling me?”
My voice comes out strange, scraped thin. What’s left is just the raw ache of having made myself completely, unreservedly open to someone who was never as lost as I was. “It’s not my business, of course, but did you even consider that it might have mattered for me to know, before I went and laid myself bare before you? Knowing you…have always been with Carter at work, almost every single day of your damn life since—”
He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. Whatever’s sitting behind his teeth seems too goddamn heavy to get out.
His eyes slide past me instead, and I watch the weight of everything he never told me finally hit him all at once. He looks pinned there by it, caught between guilt and whatever excuse he can’t force himself to say out loud.
And the fucked part is it still gets to me.
I’m sitting here feeling something crack open right through the center, and I still can’t stop watching his face for damage too. Still can’t stop caring whether this is hurting him as badly as it’s hurting me.
Then there’s a knock at the door. It swings open.
Carter comes in with a clipboard and stops the moment he reads the room. His eyes go from George to me and back again, and then he focuses on what he came in to do. He sets the clipboard on the edge of the desk. “Sorry, I need the insurance file for the Silverado.”
“Top drawer,” George says, as if nothing monumental had just been said.
Carter lifts the file without meeting anyone’s eyes. The three of us stay exactly where we are in a moment that drags itself out longer than it has any right to.
Then George says, “We’ve got history. He’s had feelings for me.”
It’s neither a question nor a statement. It’s more like a reminder, maybe a confession, as if I weren’t in the fucking room.
My head snaps toward George, not quite believing he’s doing this.
Carter looks like he’s taken a hit he didn’t see coming. He hasn’t moved, can’t seem to find words, looks blindsided. He actually looks fucking hurt.
“George, that was never—”
“It doesn’t matter.” George cuts across him, not cruel, just factual about something that exists whether anyone wants it or not. His eyes return to me. “You remember when I talked about those months at sea? Same guys, same tight spaces, long stretches with nothing but each other.” He pauses. “He’s that good friend.”
I’m barely holding it together. “George.”
“I thought you two were…” Carter trails off. His face has gone red.
Pressure builds in my chest, and I know if I stay, I’ll shatter right here. I won’t give it that.
I force myself to look at Carter directly. My voice steadies through pure survival instinct. “We’re not.”
Carter struggles with it, jaw working. “Listen. It wasn’t like that between us. Yes, I’ve been…in love with him, but what he’s saying, it’s not the whole—”
The words hit me one after another, each finding somewhere new to split open. What the ever-loving fuck would I do with that information now?
I let out a short laugh that doesn’t sound human so much as exhausted. Hurt crawls up my throat so hard it burns.
“Man, I don’t think you need to explain,” I manage to say, forcing something close to a smile even while everything inside me collapses. I look between them, and it feels like driving broken glass deeper every second I stay standing here. “You two make sense.”
My voice almost breaks on the next part.
“We did some things. That’s all.” The pressure behind my eyes spikes so fast. My vision blurs for half a second. I blink hard, because I’m absolutely fucking not doing that here. “He was helping me figure myself out.”
The words taste humiliating now, cheap. It’s like I imagined an entire future out of scraps he never meant to give me.
I nod several times because if I don’t keep moving, I might actually fall apart in front of them.
“Man…” Carter starts, moving toward me.
