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Well.
I decided to choose my next words carefully here. It felt important. “Look, when it comes to all the stuff with Fawn…”
“Oh, we don’t need to talk about Fawn.”
That surprised me, him saying that. He and the other guys had been doing nothing else but trying to get me to talk about Fawn after all this recent stuff.
Him doing the opposite now felt like a trick, so I stayed silent, and Dorian laughed.
“That whole situation is obvious regarding how you feel about her,” he continued, my heart thudding. “That shit isn’t up for debate. What confuses me is why you continue to deny it, and why you did all that shit with a fake relationship in the first place.”
My throat thickened, tightened. “I told you why.” And we already had that discussion. The topic was over, squashed.
At least, I’d thought it was.
Dorian was already shaking his head in the breeze, the wind picking up and catching his blond hair. It hadn’t been chilly tonight but breezy. His frown deepened. “Yeah, you did all that shit for us and got in over your head with the girl you did it with.”
“Dorian—”
He directed a finger at me. “No, you’ve done enough talking, and I’m going to do some now. I let you have your space to deal with shit you’re clearly not dealing with, but I’m not a fool. None of us are. There’s something fucking weird going on with you, and that goes way beyond you burying your feelings for your ex-fake girlfriend.”
My eyes closed. “D…”
“No.” He was up now, on his feet. It gave him an intimidation advantage I didn’t normally put up with, but I found I couldn’t move in that moment. Challenge him. He hunkered down in front of me. “You’re an asshole, Wolf. Hell, we all are, and when it comes to any of us guys, we’d do much worse than creating some fake-relationship bullshit if we knew it’d help a situation. If we knew it’d help, but what you did didn’t help. All it did was create mess and hurt everyone.”
I knew that, aware of that.
Dorian rubbed his jaw. “We’ve all done some fucked-up things. Like I said, we’d do worse if it meant something, but what you did, man? It was just cruel. It was cruel to Fawn, and fuck, it was cruel to us too. You know, we’d never want you to do something like that. Not for us.”
My jaw moved, and Dorian shook his head.
“You’re acting strange, man. And we’ve all seen it.” He stood up, finally giving me breathing room, distance. He laced his fingers above his head. “The kid’s been back a minute and a half, and he saw it too. He was wondering why you’d do something so fucked up, and we didn’t have any answers.”
I knew they’d compare notes, talk, but I figured that would mostly be about things between Fawn and me.
Not this.
This had me quiet in ways I shouldn’t be, but I couldn’t bring myself to get in my buddy’s face and defend myself. I found myself listening, waiting.
Hoping.
I shouldn’t be quiet right now, but I was. Dorian braced his arms. “You just haven’t been acting like yourself, and I’ve been trying to support you. Give you space. We all are.”
I dropped my head, and Dorian sighed.
“But I’m starting to regret it. I physically feel your distance, and we all feel that too. Like we’ve lost you even though you’re right in front of us.”
The words lost themselves in the trees, the breeze. It picked up in foreboding ways and even waved the fire.
I got chills from it, a deep and visceral feeling that settled into my bones. My mouth dried. “D—”
A raindrop hit my face, then another. It came down in a soft trickle, and Dorian cursed.
He pulled his hoodie’s hood up. “Brilliant. Thatch was supposed to check the fucking forecast.”
That should have been our first mistake, leaving him to do that. With the weather nice, we all decided to go camping, but getting rained on out here in our tents wasn’t what had me searching the sky. I scanned and soft illumination brightened the sky.
No.
