I find him on the sidewalk, hands in fists at his sides, facing the street. His breath makes clouds in the January cold.
He's not pacing, not moving at all. Just standing there,perfectly still. The stillness is worse than if he'd been throwing punches. I can work with punches. I don't know what to do with this.
I stop next to him and hold out his jacket. He grabs it with force, shoving his arms through the sleeves with angry, hurried movements that speak louder than anything.
"How long?"
"Since summer."
He lets out a curse aimed at the empty street.
"You promised me."
"I know."
"You looked me in the eye and you promised."
"I know, man. I know."
His face in the lamplight is exactly what I expected and still hard to take when he turns to me. Hurt underneath the anger. Betrayal underneath the hurt. This man who doesn't let people in had let me in, and I had taken the one thing he'd asked me not to touch.
"I tried." I owe him honesty. "I know it doesn't look like it. I know from where you're standing it looks like I said one thing and did another, and you're right. But I tried, man. For a year. I lived my entire life around staying away from her."
I force myself to hold his unbelieving stare. "She tried too. We both tried, and it didn't work."
I betrayed him and I hate that. If he wants to punch me, I'll let him. If he wants to hate me, I'll let him do that, too. He was my friend and I hurt him.
"She's twenty-two," he says finally, like it's a mantra, like saying it will make it mean something.
"She is."
"And you're almost thirty."
"I am."
"You've got nothing to say about that?"
"I've said everything there is to say about it to myself, for months," I say steadily, though frustration coils at that.
"But she's a grown woman, Rome. And the age gap is the same as yours and Erin's. You know that."
I watch him fight with it, watch the argument he wants to make crumble against math he can't dispute. He knows it.
The anger leaves his face in stages. First the heat, then the tension in his jaw, then the stiffness in his shoulders. What replaces it is worse. He looks tired, like a man who'd been carrying something heavy for a very long time and just been told it didn't belong to him anyway.
"She has a future, Cal." His voice is quieter now, stripped of the edge, almost gentle. "Medical school is just the start of a very long, grueling career that takes her away from here. She's worked for it since she was a kid. She's so close."
"I know."
"Whatever you two have, it ends here. When she leaves, it ends. You don't ask her to stay because that girl is one word away from wanting to stay here. You don't become the reason she gives up what she's been building."
Each word hits in the exact place that was already bleeding, because Rome isn't wrong. I've been telling myself the same thing for months, lying awake at night running the same calculations.
"I'm sorry I hurt you," I tell him, and I mean it with everything I have. "I'm sorry I broke my word and that is the whole truth."
I respect him, this man who gave up everything for the woman we both love.
"But I'm not sorry about her. There's no version of this where she and I exist in the same world and don't happen."
