Page 174 of Arctic Titans of Northwood U: Volume 3

A moment of quiet.

A moment of forgetting.

I didn’t know how long it would last, but I needed it all the same.

Chapter Eighteen

SETH

I sat in the empty room, lit by the desk lamp, leaning back in my chair and staring out the window. The streetlamps cast an orange haze through the frost on the window glass, sparse snowflakes forcing their way down from the sky.

When my roommate quietly turned the key and pushed the door open, he paused, seeing that I was awake. I watched the reflection of his slouching figure as he shut the door behind himself. He felt bad, but it was too late for that. He was ready to confess, but I already knew. Some paranoid part of me discovered the truth deep within all my doubts, then held on to it until I was certain.

“You’re awake,” Silas said.

I didn’t reply. I didn’t turn the chair around. Why should I? I owed him nothing. Not a reply and definitely not a warning about trusting the wrong person. He would discover that on his own, just like I did.

“Seth?” Silas said, voice thin and wrecked with guilt. “Seth, I didn’t…I didn’t mean to fuck things up for you.”

At least he wasn’t pretending anymore.

“What happened?” he asked.

Finally, I turned the chair around, watching the guilt shatter across his face when his gaze landed on my red, stinging eyes and the hard line of my mouth. “You tell me what happened first. What happened with you and your mystery crush, Silas?”

Silas swallowed. “I’ll tell you everything.”

I shrugged, waiting, and observed him as he crossed the room and sat down on the edge of his bed. He looked at his hands, both resting in his lap, palms up, fingers trembling just enough to make me feel bad for him. But no. I wasn’t going to let pity cloud my judgment. Not when he so carelessly stabbed me and twisted the knife, smiling all along.

“I swore I wouldn’t tell you,” Silas said. “He has these…stupid ideas that coming out would fuck with his career. I didn’t want to out him. Not to anyone. Not even to you.”

“But that wasn’t true the other way around,” I said. “You told him about me and Damon.”

Silas sank a little lower, exhaling and lifting his gaze to meet mine. “I didn’t know why it was such a secret. You never said.”

“And you never thought that telling my brother who I was fucking could complicate things in my life?” I asked, barking a bitter laugh. “He’s a hypocrite, Silas. And so are you.”

“Seth, please,” Silas whispered, leaning in. “I wouldn’t have told him if I knew he hated Damon so much. I just thought it was funny, you know? Yeah, I get it. I’m stupid. Never was that smart. Not like you.”

“Right,” I said. “It can’t be your fault. You just weren’t thinking.”

He nodded and turned away from my gaze. He was silent for the longest time, turning over the words and deciding not to say them. There were no excuses I would accept tonight. Not after I had thrown away the best goddamn thing I’d ever had because of his stupid yapping.

We’d been so busy joking about who Silas was dating from Damon’s team that it had never crossed our minds to look elsewhere. The only games he went to were those when the Titans played against the Breakers. He was there for Nick, knowing all along that I was there for Damon.

“So when we went to games and Nick thought I was there to watch him play, you told him the truth?” I asked.

Silas shook his head. “Only last week. It was a joke, Seth. I let it slip when I was teasing him.”

He went quiet again, silence stretching endlessly, as I let the pieces fall into place. Nick. He’d never brought a girl home, yet I’d always assumed that he was straight because why the fuck wouldn’t he tell me? Why the fuck would he have left me to struggle with accepting my own sexuality when he was well aware I wasn’t alone?

“I think I love him,” Silas said. “Fuck, Seth, I think I do.”

“Great. Hope he treats you better than his own brother.”

Silas bit back a whimper that almost escaped him. He looked at me with tears in his eyes, and I couldn’t be cruel anymore. I just couldn’t, no matter how much I wanted him to feel a bit of the pain that I felt. “I’m really sorry, Seth. There’s nothing I can say to make it right, but I can try hard to change his mind about you and Damon.”

Then, I laughed. It was a desperate laugh, terrifying for the absence of humor. “You didn’t think that I had a reason to keep Damon a secret, Silas. Nick will never understand. He broke Damon’s collarbone on purpose. Did you know that? He rammed into him so hard because he wanted to break him.”