Page 82 of Smoke and Glitter

"I think I do."

"I know what I fucking said, Bex."

For a few seconds she lets me stand there with it. The club keeps moving outside the closed door, music coming through the wall beneath the clink of glass and voices from the bar, while the whole conversation starts replaying in my head with Autumn somewhere on the other side of it.

When Bex finally speaks, she doesn't soften it.

"She heard you say it wasn't that deep."

I drop my head.

I'd known the words were bad. I sure as hell knew it afterward. What I hadn't known was that Autumn heard them from my own lips, standing inside my office while I talked about the two of us like she wasn't part of the conversation.

After a moment I look back at Bex. "You knew she'd heard all that?"

"I knew she'd heard enough to hurt her. I didn't know exactly where she'd started listening, and by the time I got outside she was already trying to pull herself together."

"Then why didn't you tell me?"

Regret pulls at Bex's mouth. "Because days later she came back."

I don't say anything.

"Think about it, Sam. She walked into Vibes, asked to talk to you and went upstairs with you. I assumed she was going to tell you what she'd heard and the two of you were finally going to have the conversation we'd just spent months pretending you weren't having."

"But she didn't tell me."

"I know that now." Bex rubs a hand over the back of her neck. "At the time, you told me afterward that you'd talked. I wasn't here when she left, and you didn't exactly give me a play-by-play. I thought she'd confronted you, you knew what she'd heard, and whatever happened between you after that was between the two of you."

I stare at her, the night Autumn came upstairs already starting to look completely different.

Bex lets out a breath. "I thought you knew."

The night Autumn came to confront me rearranges itself in my head. She kept her coat on, hands buried in the pockets even though she'd spent enough nights upstairs to know exactly where she would've dropped it if she planned on staying.

Tell me what this is. What am I to you?

I thought she was asking for information. Instead she'd walked in already carrying every safe answer I'd given Bex and waited to see whether I'd give her something different to her face.

I sit on the edge of the desk because standing still suddenly takes more concentration than it should.

"She wasn't asking because she didn't know."

Bex doesn't answer.

"She wanted me to say something different."

"Yeah."

Then the rest of that night comes back with it.

Autumn asked me to treat her differently downstairs. Not privately. Not in my apartment where nobody could see us. In Vibes, in the middle of people who had known what we were before I was willing to say it. Then she asked me for one true thing about myself that she hadn't learned from someone else.

I gave her nothing.

I remember her standing across the room from me, waiting while I reached for every safe answer I had.

Do you want this?