Page 74 of We Are Just Us

You two are the only ones who’ve never kept anything from me.

He sat on the couch in the dark for a long time.

He didn’t text Emory. He didn’t open his laptop. He sat with the dogs pressed against his legs and the silence pressing against everything else, and let the thing sharpen into a single emotion he could name.

It still wasn’t anger. Not exactly. He was standing in a room he thought he knew, discovering a door he’d never noticed. And behind it, a whole other house.

A few minutes later, headlights cut a slow arc across the living room wall—Rory’s truck finally pulling in next door. When the engine died, the sudden, ringing silence made the whole house emptier.

TWENTY-TWO

Two days passed.

Kieran went to the coffee shop. Wrote a Substack draft, then deleted. Walked the dogs on the beach and let them run until they were too tired to care about anything. He saw Rory’s truck come and go from the driveway. He didn’t go over. Rory didn’t either.

The silence between their two front doors had a texture to it now. Thick. Careful.

On Sunday morning, Kieran heard Rory’s screen door open and close, heard the familiar sound of him settling into the porch chair, and the pull to go out there was so strong it was almost physical.

He stayed inside.

He’d spent two days trying to organize what was moving through him, and the problem was that it kept reorganizing itself. The betrayal was clean at first, he didn’t tell me, but underneath it was murkier.

Shame, maybe.

Because Kieran had been lying next to this man, told him about his mother, about the closet, about the things he carried for years in silence, and he thought that meant they were even. That the vulnerability was mutual.

It wasn’t.

He’d been naked in every way that mattered, and Rory was still dressed.

On Sunday afternoon, Kieran was sitting on his front steps with Mabel when Rory’s door opened.

He came out slowly. Jeans, bare feet, a T-shirt Kieran recognized from a dozen lazy mornings. He stood on his side of the porch with an awkward hesitation, then walked over.

“Can we talk?”

Kieran knew this was coming. Had been dreading it and wanting it in equal measure.

“Yeah,” he said. “We should.”

Rory sat down on the step beside him. Not close. A careful distance. Mabel looked between them, then padded inside like she’d decided this wasn’t her business.

For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The street was quiet. Somewhere down the block, someone was using a leaf blower.

“I should have told you about Britt,” Rory said. “Before Vera. Before any of that. I know that.”

“Okay,” Kieran said. Level. Neutral.

“I wasn’t hiding it. I just…I don’t lead with it. I spent years being the guy whose wife died. The sad one. The one people didn’t know how to talk to.” Rory was looking at his hands. “I’m not doing that anymore.”

“There’s a difference between not leading with it and keeping it from someone you’re sleeping with.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

Rory’s head came up. “Yes. I know.”