Page 75 of Beautiful When He Breaks

He’s right, and I hate that he’s right. We’ve been hurting in parallel ways for too damn long, both of us trying to keep our own heads above water while looking at the other one and thinking not now, not one more thing, I’ll ask later.

I move before I think too hard and pull him into me. He comes without hesitation. The second my arms go around him, he folds forward enough that his forehead presses against my shoulder, and I hold him there with one hand at the back of his neck and the other across his upper back. He’s warm, tense, and shaking a little now that the words are out and there’s no more point in pretending otherwise.

“I’m going to kill him,” I murmur into his hair.

Julian lets out a tired sound that might’ve been a laugh in another universe. “Everybody keeps saying that.”

“Because it’s the correct response.”

“Probably.”

I hold him tighter, and for a while, that’s all we do. Just sit there on the edge of my bed with Mila asleep beside us, the house quiet around us, and too much pain finally named out loud between our bodies. I can feel his breathing start to even out against me, slowly. Not calm exactly, just less brittle.

The silence isn’t awkward. It’s just heavy with everything that’s changed tonight and everything that was already changing before either of us had the courage to name it. I can feel the exhaustion rolling off him now that the telling is done. It hangs around his eyes, his shoulders, the way his body is trying to stay upright through sheer pride.

“You’re staying here tonight,” I say eventually.

He pulls back and his head tips slightly. “That wasn’t a question.”

“Nope.”

He lets out another tired little laugh and hangs his head in his hands. “Bossy.”

“Yeah, well, apparently that’s what happens when you’re in love with an asshole and also furious on his behalf.”

The second the words leave my mouth, the room goes absolutely still, and I stop breathing. I did not mean to say that out loud. Or maybe I did, somewhere under all the fear and the anger and the pitying tenderness that’s been eating through me since he walked in. Either way, it’s out now. Hanging there. Irretrievable.

Julian looks up at me with wide eyes. “Eli…”

There are a thousand things I could do in that moment. I could take it back, pretend I meant it platonically, laugh it off, or make some stupid joke and drag us both back from the edge before the truth can finish forming.

I don’t do any of them because I am so tired of lying—not just to him, but to myself too. My throat works once, and when I speak again, my voice is shaking and more honest than I’ve ever let it be.

“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with that yet,” I admit. “I don’t know what it means for me or for us or any of it. But I know I almost kissed you in the den because I wanted to. I know I’ve been looking at you differently. I know thinking about you keeps me awake at night for reasons that are definitely not friendly anymore. And hearing what he did to you makes me want to burn the world down and hold you at the same time, and maybe those are not the same feeling, but they’re both real.”

Julian closes his eyes for one second as if the words hurt. When he opens them again, there is so much naked relief in his face that my chest nearly caves in around it.

“You really pick your moments, Matthews,” he says softly.

A laugh breaks out of me before I can stop it, wet around the edges and half wrecked. “I know. Sorry.”

We sit there looking at each other with all the air in the room changed, and I don’t know what comes next in a normal life. In a normal life, maybe there’d be a kiss here, finally, or some perfect line, or a clean answer to the question of what we are now.

This is not a normal life. We’re in my room, with my sleeping daughter next to us, his confession still fresh and aching between us. We’re just two men who have wanted, hurt, and held onto each other for years in ways neither one fully understood soon enough.

So instead of kissing him, I say the truest thing I’ve got left. “Come here.”

Julian doesn’t hesitate as he shifts with me, and suddenly we’re both moving toward the headboard, making room on the bed without saying out loud that neither of us wants to be alone tonight.

We lie facing each other, one hand under my cheek, the other resting on the blanket between us.

For a while, we just talk. Not about everything; that would be impossible. At some point, the conversation drifts, but that’s what exhaustion does, I guess. The big, impossible truths burn hot for a while and then leave behind smaller, stranger things.

I don’t know when exactly talking turns into drowsy mumbling, only that at some point, I realize his voice has gone softer and slower, and mine has too. My hand ends up on his wrist somewhere in the dark. His fingers find mine. Nothing bigger than that. Nothing that would demand an answer from either of us before morning. Just contact.

The last thing I remember before sleep finally pulls me under is Julian saying my name one more time.

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