I’m so tired. So unbelievably tired of being understanding when it’smyheart getting broken.
I start walking because standing still hurts too much.
No direction.
Just away.
My phone is in my pocket vibrating and I don't take it out.
Whatever he has to say right now I don't want to hear it.
I’m tired of the sorrys.
I already know.
I've always known.
I just didn't want to be right.
He didn’t choose me.
Chapter 52
Jamie
I see Marcus Hale the second we walk in. Not because I'm looking for him. Because he's already looking at Rhys. That's the first thing. Before I've processed the face or matched it to anything Rhys told me — I notice a man across the bar who cannot stop watching Rhys walk through the door. Tracking him. The way you track something you've decided belongs to you.
I stay where I am and just watch him.
Rhys doesn't look at him.
That's also how I know. Rhys, who reads every room the second he enters it, who always knows where I am before I've decided where I'm going — he walks in and carefully, very deliberately does not look at that side of the bar.
He nods at me.
I nod back.
We've been doing that all week. Professional. Careful. The distance I put between us maintained like a structure neither of us has figured out how to dismantle.
All my fault, but it still fucking hurts.
He goes to find Bennett.
I turn back to the bar. And I watch Marcus Hale watch him go. The fury that moves through me is so immediate and so complete that I have to set my glass down before I break it.
Because I know who this is now.
I know exactly who this is.
This is the man who moved his furniture and set up a projector and made a room look like it was underwater and saidI love youto a kid who had nobody. Who sat in a locker room every single day while that same kid scrubbed marker off his own locker and found somewhere else to look. Who heard what happened in the shower and said nothing. Who told teammates that Rhys had been making him uncomfortable and then let the story do the rest and went on with his life.
This man stood right next to him every day and chose silence. Chose himself, while he left someone so deserving of everything this world has to offer, to suffer alone.
And now he's standing in this bar watching Rhys with those eyes — those grieving, possessive, you-were-mine eyes — like he gets to feel that, as if he gets to stand there and miss what he destroyed with his own two hands and look at it from across a room like it's something that was taken from him, not something he left out in the rain to drown.
My hand is flat on the bar.
The wood is cold under my palm.
