Page 42 of Wreckage and Rain

“I heard the way you sounded.”

He turns away from me, takes two steps, then turns back.

“Summer, I hear you. I do. I know I’ve been absent. I know I fucked up your birthday, and there is no excuse for that. But Cheyenne is my colleague. Tidewater has been brutal. The hours, the pressure, my father breathing down my neck. You’re already hurt, and I think maybe you’re seeing all of this through—”

He stops.

Too late.

“Say it.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“Say the word.”

He shakes his head.

“Insecure?” I ask. “Jealous? Paranoid? Overreacting?”

“I don’t think you’re paranoid.”

“But you think I’m wrong.”

“I think you’re taking separate things and turning them into one thing.”

“They are one thing.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Don’t you dare do this to me.”

My voice finally breaks loose.

“Do not stand there and turn this into something we are both doing. I am not coming home at midnight. I am not lying about where I am. I am not spending Sunday morning laughing with another man while you move through the house unnoticed.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“You were about to tell me we’re looking at it through the wrong lens. There is no ‘we’ here, Colt. This is not happening to both of us.”

I press my hand to my chest.

“This is happening to me.”

He flinches.

“You are doing it.”

For a long time, neither of us speaks.

His face has gone blank in the way it does when something hits too hard and he needs time to decide where to put it.

Finally, he says, “I love you.”

His voice is rough.

“I love you more than anything in this world.”

“I know.”