Page 24 of Trust my Heart

“And here’s the part I never said out loud. All that pressure, the threats of having our relationship revealed by whoever, that’s not what broke us. You ended us. You looked at what it would cost to stand next to me and you decided it cost too much. I never asked you to come out. I wouldn’t have. That door was yours to open or keep shut, and I respected it. But there’s a difference between staying quiet and leaving. You could have stayed and been quiet and mine, and you left, and you didn’t fight for one inch of us. You picked your name in that building over me. That’s what I got to find out I was worth.”

My throat had gone tight. I stopped and waited it out, because I was not doing that in front of him.

“So no. I don’t miss it. I survived it. Those are two different things.”

It did not come out level. I’d had years to write it, and it came out with my throat closing on the end of it anyway. But it was true, every word, and even shaking, it felt like setting something down.

Adam remained silent for a while. He didn’t perform sitting with it, no slow nod, no closed eyes. He just went quiet, and it went on long enough that the espresso machine ran twice.

“You’re right,” he said, finally. “Everything you just said. I’ve had years to find a version of it where I come out better, and there isn’t one.” He turned the cup once and left it. “I was scared, Luke. Of the threats, of the brass and the future, but mostly of what that building was going to call me once it was said out loud. You were braver about it than I ever was. I told myself that leaving was protecting you. I’m gone, the threats stop to matter, you get your career back. I believed it while I packed. I might have believed it for a year after.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t protection. It was me saving myself, dressed up as a favor. I can’t fix it from here. I just needed to sit across from you once and say I know what I did. I’m sorry.”

I looked at him for a while. He held it, open-faced, and I’d arrested men with faces like that, and I’d buried friends with faces like that, and no course tells them apart. I was tired, and it was old, and I had a life across town that was worth more than any of it.

“Forget it,” I said. “It’s a long time ago. We’re colleagues now, and there’s no reason we can’t be decent at it.”

“Colleagues.” He nodded once, like a man signing something. “I’ll hold to it. No hard feelings, Luke.” He stood and took his coat off the chair.

He didn’t ask me to forgive him, and he didn’t ask me to believe him, and he didn’t ask me to carry one word of it home to Ryan. I sat a moment at our old table with my coffee gone cold, and then I followed him out, because we were both walking back through the same lights.

We came out onto Broadview together. The evening had gone gray, traffic thick going north. He kept the conversation going, easy, about the course schedule and a supervisor we’d both known, and he kept it going the whole block, never once letting the quiet come back, and I was only half in it, because most of me was still back at that table.

At the corner the light changed and I stepped down to cross, not looking, still half at the table.

His hand closed on my arm and hauled me back hard. “Watch it.” I came off my feet and into him, chest to chest, his other hand already at the back of my head, and before I had my balance his mouth was on mine.

For a second I didn’t move. One second, and everything came up in it, four years of a relationship I had grieved and buried. Then Ryan. Ryan’s face, clear as day.

I got both hands on his chest and shoved, hard, harder than I needed to. He went back two steps and caught himself on the light pole.

“Never again.” My voice came out low and dark. “Do you hear me? Never.”

“Luke.” His palms came up. “There was a car. It came through fast and you weren’t looking. I wasn’t going to stand there and let it clip you.”

I looked at the street. Traffic going north the way it had been all along, nothing turning, nothing close, the crossing empty. Maybe something had come and gone while my back was to it. Maybe.

He was still talking when I walked. I crossed against the light with the traffic honking at me, and I didn’t hear that either.

I took the long way home. Down Broadview to the park, the whole slope of it going dark, and up along the streets I used to walk in the worst year, when walking was the only thing that worked. I felt like I’d been hit. I walked fast, and the walking didn’t help.

I kept going back to the car. I never saw a car. I made myself run it again, slow, from stepping off the curb, and there was his hand on my arm and there was his mouth and there was the empty crossing after, and nowhere in it was a car. I couldn’t swear one hadn’t come through while I was turned away, dusk and thick traffic and me not looking. That was the thing. I couldn’t swear either way, and I had the cold feeling he’d known I wouldn’t be able to. There was a car if he said there was a car. Prove otherwise.

And for one block it came too close to things I’d spent a month refusing to think about. A thing that happened with no way to say for certain it did, and him on the far side of it, sorry and reasonable. I heard Ryan at the counter, flags nobody could explain, and I made myself set the whole thought down, because a kiss I hadn’t wanted was not the list of things Ryan had accused him of, and I knew the difference. I told myself I knew the difference.

And what came up under that, block after block, wasn’t Adam. It was Ryan. How much I missed him. Days of silence in our own apartment, of handing files across a gap, and I wanted him back so plainly it embarrassed me. The two of them kept surfacing together, and for once I made myself look at it instead of putting it away. They were alike in ways I had never let myself line up. The charm. The ease in a room. The way people leaned toward both of them without being asked. But Adam used things. Situations, people, half-seconds. Ryan worked a room too, and half the time he didn’t even know he was doing it, and when he did know, he was talking somebody down or smoothing something over, not taking anything for himself. I was never going back to Adam. That was not even a question tonight. The question that walked home with me was how many years I had looked straight at him and seen only what love let me see.

Or maybe I was overthinking all of it. Maybe it was just Ryan’s voice going around in my head. I’m afraid of the damage he could cause.

By our street I had settled the only thing I could settle. I wasn’t telling him tonight. Not the coffee, not the curb, none of it. I could see exactly what the choice was. It was the same choice I had torn him apart for, holding something back and calling it protection, and I was making it anyway, at my own door, because I wanted him back more than I wanted to be honest about my evening. Not never, I told myself. Just not tonight.

The apartment was warm and the lights were on low. Ryan was at the counter with a file open, sleeves pushed up, and there was a plate by the stove with a second plate turned over on top of it to keep the heat in. He’d cooked, and he’d left me mine. It was the first move either of us had made in all that time, and he’d made it before he knew whether I was coming home civil.

He looked up. Careful, not cold. He’d noticed the hour and he wasn’t asking about it.

I hung my coat on the hook and stayed standing at the end of the counter.

“I want to say something,” I said. “It’s short.”

He closed the file.