He shakes his head once, rough and frustrated.
“You think this is about me being noble or pushing you away? It’s not. I know exactly what I am in your life.” His voice drops lower. “I’m the guy who stayed in one place long enough for you to get attached to him. That’s it.”
A hard swallow.
“There’s nothing special about me, Lance. I fix cars. I go home. I do the same damn thing every day. And I especially don’t wantto come across as someone who latched on you because you’ve got fucking money.”
“Who the fuck even cares about that?” The words burst out cracked and raw before I can stop them. “You think I care about any of that shit? I grew up around people who had everything and spent half their lives trying to convince everyone else they deserved it. You’re the only person who’s never tried to be anything other than exactly who you are.”
“That’s not the same as being enough,” he says, his shoulders dropping slightly.
“What your friend said at that bar? He wasn’t wrong. I’ll walk into your world and I’m already figuring out how long I need to stay before I can leave.”
He swipes rain off his face with the back of his wrist and huffs out a sigh.
“I know what losing a parent does to a person. When my dad died, all I wanted was to be near anything that still felt like him—the shop, his tools. Anything.”
He avoids my eyes.
“Your mom’s sick. You’d want to be near her, near home, everything that’s actually yours. I’m not stupid enough to think that’s here. I can’t get out of this town. Can’t do anything else but that shop. This is everything I’ve got, and it’s the only life I know how to run.”
George looks back at me.
“We’ve never been apart more than a few weeks in ten years. You think a few calls every now and then is going to be enough for either of us? There wouldn’t be an ‘us’ left, Lance—just two people who used to be, hurting slower, growing further apart.”
I stare at him. I can’t breathe.
Somehow, after everything, he still thinks this is about convenience, like he’s interchangeable. As if he’s some placeholder in my life.
The tears spill over before I can stop them.
“Why would you think I’d forget you?” My voice comes out raw, barely holding together. “George, you’ve always been someone I look for first at any place or time.”
His expression looks pained as I shake my head.
“You’re who I call when something good happens, or when everything goes wrong.”
My throat burns.
“You think this is about finding somebody who fits my world?” I laugh once, broken.
“You are my world.”
The rain just fucking fills the silence between us.
“So tell me how the fuck I’m supposed to replace that.”
I don’t know how to want things from a distance, or how to be a man who had it all and tries to live without them.
George doesn’t move. When he finally speaks, it doesn’t sound like an answer. “Don’t tell me what I’m also losing too.”
A breath shakes on the way out.
The rain turns heavy fast, soaking through our clothes in seconds.
George turns away from me, shoulders hunched against the downpour. For a long moment, he just stands there with his back to me, breathing hard.
He spins around and stares at the wet gravel between us, can’t bear to look at me in the eye. “Can’t keep us stuck like this. The shop is falling apart, the bills are piling up, and I don’t have room in my life for anything messy right now, especially not this, or us.”
