Page 71 of Iron

Gavin's fork stops entirely.

“TJ.”

“What? I'm just saying, you are such a prize. He’s a damned idiot. I suppose you couldn’t get pregnant.” I keep my voice down, keep my face perfectly innocent. Gavin loses the battle against a laugh, and it comes out loud enough to turn a few heads at nearby tables.

I see Marius's eyes cut toward us before Gavin's even finished laughing, sharp and quick, there and gone, and I feel something settle into place in my chest, warm and a little vicious. Good. Let him look. Let him see Gavin happy.

I smirk down at my potato and say nothing else, because I don't need to. Gavin's still shaking his head at me when the emcee taps the microphone up front and starts running through the silent auction results.

Our watercolor comes up third. Gavin's bid, unsurprisingly, wins.

“That's ours,” I say, with a bounce in my chair, more excited than I probably should be about a painting, but I don't care. “That's going right over the bed.”

“We should have it shipped.”

“We could carry it.”

“TJ, it's four feet wide. We're not putting a four-foot watercolor on a private jet like carry-on luggage.”

“You say that like you don't have the room.”

“I have the room. I don't have the patience to watch you try to hold a painting steady through turbulence.” He's already got his phone out, texting someone, arranging shipping the way he arranges everything: efficient and a bit bossy about it. I love it. “It'll beat us home. Probably by a day.”

“Fine. Ship it.” I lean into his shoulder for a moment, just because I can, just because we're allowed to be here like this. “But I'm the one hanging it.”

“You're not tall enough to hang a four-foot painting by yourself.”

“I have a ladder.”

“You have me.”

I don't have a comeback for that one, mostly because it's true and mostly because the way he says it, easy, certain, like it's just a fact about how things are now, does something to my chest that I don't have words for.

We're gathering our coats near the door when I feel it before I see it, that same shift in the air Gavin must've felt earlier, and then Marius is right there, close enough that I can smell his cologne, something sharp and expensive and trying too hard.

“Gavin.” The voice comes from behind us as we're gathering our coats, easy, casual, like they're old friends catching up instead of whatever they actually are. His eyes cut toward me once, quick, assessing, before he settles his attention back on Gavin. “Didn't expect to see you here. Heard you skipped the Championship.”

“I did.”

“Brave.” Marius says it like a compliment, but something underneath it doesn't sit right, some current I can't quite name yet. “Missing a Cup for a guy. That's… quite a statement to make, publicly like that.” His eyes flick toward me again, and I feel it land somewhere uncomfortable, though I can't tell yet if it's meant to. “I couldn’t have done that. Put it all out there like you two have.”

“Nobody's asking you to,” Gavin says evenly, unbothered.

“No. No, of course not.” Marius laughs, short, a little too fast, and I catch the way his gaze drifts toward the woman in red a few feet off, the wife, deep in conversation with someone else, oblivious to any of this. “It's just interesting, that’s all. Watching you do the thing I always figured would end a career. Sponsors, coverage, all of it.” He lowers his voice slightly, like he's letting Gavin in on something private. “Some of us made different choices. Kept things quieter. Simpler.”

I feel my whole body go tight, some instinct telling me exactly what's happening even before I fully understand it. This isn't an insult, not really, not the kind I was braced for. It's something sadder than that, something that sounds almost like envy dressed up as pity.

“Some of us made a choice to be miserable, you mean,” Gavin says.

Something flickers across Marius's face, fast, gone before it fully lands, but I catch it too. Whatever it is, it looks a lot like fear.

“I'm not miserable, Gavin.”

“Okay.”

“I'm not.”

“I said okay.”