"I am trying," I hiss back. "This is me fucking trying."
Trying and failing, miserably, catastrophically, in full view of anyone paying attention.
I am next to two couples touching openly, existing openly, loving openly. And I'm sitting here with my friends pretending I don't know what Lily's skin tastes like at three in the morning, pretending I hadn't held her face and watched her sleep eighteen hours ago. Pretending she's Rome's little sister and nothing else while my chest cracks wider with every minute.
Lily is talking to Poppy about the bachelorette, her hands moving, her eyes bright. She looks happy, but her smile is thinner than it used to be. I've been watching it fade by degrees over the last few weeks, the wattage dimming so slowly that nobody else would notice.
I notice because I can't look away. Every now and then, when conversation pulls everyone else's attention away for a second, her eyes find mine across the table and stay there. The hunger in them is something she used to hide better.
I'm furious at the booth arrangement. At the distance. At the pretending. At the fact that Ramsey can kiss Poppy's temple in front of God and everyone but I can't put my hand over Lily's without calculating the risk first, without running the math on who's watching and what they might see and whether Rome's angle of vision includes the space between our fingers.
I'm tired. Deep-to-my-bones tired, and it's not about work or sleep or anything that rest could fix. It's about hiding. About performing a version of myself that doesn't include her. About sitting three feet away from the woman I want and pretending she's not the center of every thought I have.
She catches my eye again, angled through her lashes mid-sentence with Poppy. Half a second. Gray eyes, warm mouth, the faintest pull at the corner of her lips that only I can read.
I love her.
The thought arrives without ceremony, undramatic, just a fact dropping into place with quiet finality.
I love her. I'm in love with her.
I've been in love with her for months, maybe longer, and I called it everything else because calling it what it was meant admitting I was exactly the man my father was. It meant admitting that the woman I loved was leaving, and that nothing about that changed just because my heart had made up its mind.
I love Lily Moreland, and the timing is catastrophic. The most inconvenient feeling in the most inconvenient place with the most inconvenient person.
The reasons why I'm wrong for her are still the same. I'm still a simple firefighter in a small town who still lives and will forever live with his dad, in the house where my mother died. I have nothing to offer her, but a life smaller than the one she's been building toward since she was a kid.
But I want to keep her forever. Here, in this town, in my house, in my bed, in my car with her playlists and her bare feet on my dashboard. I want to cook her breakfast and drive her to work and watch her argue with my father about everything until we're all old and gray and Dad is telling stories about Mom to our kids.
Our kids. I'm thinking about kids? I'm losing my mind, lost it months ago probably, there is no more doubt about that.
My beer is warm. I haven't touched it in twenty minutes.
"Cal." Lily's voice cuts across the table, pulling me out of my own head. "You haven't touched your beer. Want some water?"
I hate when she calls me Cal. I understand the distance she's faking in front of everyone, the performance we're both giving, but I hate it anyway. I'm so lost in her that I'll take whatever she throws my way, even the wrong name, even the casualness that keeps us safe.
"No, baby, I'm okay."
The second the words leave my mouth, I know what I've done.
Her face says it all, eyes going wide, lips parting. I’m having an out-of-body experience. I'm watching it happenfrom somewhere outside myself, noticing how everyone at the table goes still. Everyone processing what I just said at different speeds.
Poppy's hand freezes on her glass. Ramsey closes his eyes briefly, a man watching a car accident in slow motion and knowing he can't stop it. Erin turns to Lily with worried eyes. Lily stares at me, her expression caught somewhere between horror and surrender.
I keep my eyes on her, but I don't need to see Rome's face to know what it's doing. I know what Rome looks like when he's angry. I know every suspicion he'd swallowed over the last year confirming itself at the very moment.
He stands up. No announcement. No scene. Just pushes back from the booth and walks out, his coat still hanging on the back of his seat, the door swinging shut behind him before any of us can move.
Erin reaches for his arm and misses, her fingers closing on empty air.
Lily starts to get up, and I see the panic in her face, the desperate need to follow, to fix, to explain. I stand first, crossing to her side of the booth before she can slide out.
"Stay here." Her eyes are wide and scared when they meet mine, and I lean down and press my mouth to her forehead, not caring anymore who sees. "It's going to be okay."
Her hand comes up and grips my wrist, holding on for one second before she forces herself to let go.
I grab Rome's jacket and follow him out the door.
