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I take another drink, though the bourbon no longer reaches the pressure beneath my sternum.
“I know she wants my pain and suffering because she wants to wear the guilt…” I shake my head. “I know the exact moment I knew I was in love with her.” I shrug. “That’s the shit that presses me, not the pain but the shit I never got.”
Cade studies me. “You never told her?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Back then, I was afraid putting it into words would make her run. Or worse, that she would stand there looking at me and realize she didn’t feel it back.” I glance toward Charm before lowering my attention to the glass. “Now she says it all the time. We have both admitted we never stopped loving each other, but I still haven’t told her when it happened.”
“Why not?” Easton asks.
“Because it belongs to the version of us I can’t figure out anymore. If I tell her, I hand her another piece of evidence that what we had was real. She’ll use it to build a future, and I don’t know whether I can give her one.”
Cade’s mouth tightens. “Or you’ll use withholding it to keep convincing yourself there isn’t one.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“You’re scared to stay,” he says. “That makes sense. What she did nearly destroyed you.”
“I’m more scared to leave.”
The admission silences all four of them.
I place the glass on the bar before my hand can break it. “If I stay, I risk teaching both of us that I will always abandon myself the second she starts drowning. If I leave, I go back to Milwaukee knowing she finally became strong enough to fight and I was too fucking terrified to find out whether she could learn to fight for me too.”
Briggs steps closer. “Wanting her doesn’t invalidate what you suffered.”
“I know.”
“No, you know it intellectually. You are still acting like taking her back would mean admitting she didn’t hurt you badly enough.”
My attention snaps toward him.
He doesn’t retreat. “You’re allowed to love her, resent her, want her, understand her illness, and remain scared shitless she’ll break you again,” Briggs says. “You don’t have to murder one truth to make room for another.”
“And what am I supposed to do with all of them?”
“Give her the opportunity to see you,” Cade says. “Then pay attention to what she does with it.”
“I already gave her one last night.”
“Then decide whether you have enough left to offer another. Nobody at this bar gets to make that choice for you, including me.”
Cade fills my glass again but only halfway. “You don’t have to decide the rest of your life beside an outdoor bar the night before my wedding. You only need to stop pretending leaving is automatically more honest than staying.”
Across the lawn, Charm laughs at something Temple says. The sound finds me beneath the music, fire, and conversation separating us.
My body reacts before my mind can construct another defense.
Cade notices. “That right there is an unbelievable connection, Ry. Being afraid of it doesn’t make you weak, and wanting to fight for it doesn’t make what happened to you disappear.”
I take the drink.
