I huff out a breath. “Also fair.”
Silence crashes down after that. Thick. Suffocating. No one moves. No one looks away. Because we all feel it now. What this is. What it means. And the fact that we can’t pretend it isn’t there anymore.
I lift my chin slightly, meeting each of their gazes in turn. “I don’t regret it,” I say simply. “And I’m not going to pretend I don’t feel what I feel.”
No one argues.
Alette shifts beside me, her fingers tightening slightly in the fabric of her nightgown. “I… I didn’t mean for any of this to?—”
“You didn’t cause it,” Sylvian says immediately.
Cassius sighs. “But this does bring to the forefront the obvious. We need to talk. About this. About us.”
Alette stills. All of us do.
“Now?” she asks, quieter.
Cassius holds her gaze. “Yes.”
Silence stretches.
Then, she nods.
And just like that, there’s no going back.
9
Alette
Cassius’s words echo in my head.We need to talk.
My heart lurches.Oh gods. This is it. They’re going to tell me I can only be with one of them. That I have to choose between them.I can feel the heat rushing back into my face, my thoughts scrambling over each other before I can catch a single one of them.
“I—okay, I—” I start, and immediately hate how breathless I sound.
I clasp my hands together in front of me, fingers twisting, trying to ground myself and failing completely.
“I’m sorry,” I blurt out again.
The words come too fast, too loud in the silence.
“I didn’t mean for that to happen, I just—I don’t really know what I’m doing,” I rush on, the words tumbling over each other now. “I don’t have a lot of experience with… with any of this, and I know that I’m supposed to?—”
I stop, swallow hard, then push through anyway.
“I’m supposed to pick one person.”
There it is. The truth I’ve always known. The rule that makes sense. The rule that suddenly… doesn’t.
“But I can’t,” I admit, my voice softer now, more fragile.
My gaze flicks between them, one by one, like I’m searching for the right answer somewhere in their faces.
“I don’t know how to do that,” I say, shaking my head slightly. “Because it’s not just one of you. It’s all of you, and I know that’s wrong, I know it is, but I?—”
The words falter as a painful ache curls through me.
“I’ve never felt like this before,” I go on, quieter now, but no less desperate to make them understand. “Not even close. I don’t even know what this is supposed to be, but I?—”
