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Dom had been a bit odd after the initial confession. His good-night text had been short, and there hadn’t been a good-morning one. But he’d come into his classroom Friday morning to find a little box containing a single croissant and a paper swan with a dodgy little wolf scribbled in the center.
And the weekend had gone just like every other weekend. Dom showed up for farm chores early, stayed late for tea, played music with Shiloh’s dad, and watched crap telly when they were too sore to move.
Life had seemed normal.
And a bit more perfect.
“Did you know Jules is going to propose to me at the party?”
Shiloh let out a soft laugh. “Yeah. He told me on the trip. He also insisted you knew.”
“Well, he’s not dead and buried, is he?” Sarah pointed out.
Shiloh leaned back slightly and squinted at her. “If you speak to him the way you’re speaking to me, it’s a bloody wonder he wants to do this at all.”
“You know what,” she started, then froze and deflated, dropping her forehead to her arms. “I’m sorry, babes.”
Shiloh immediately deflated too, his frustration with her melting into pity. He gently brushed his hand over her plait, which was hanging down the middle of her back. “What’s got you so worked up? Is it the marriage thing?”
Sarah turned her head to look at him properly. “D’you think the reason he doesn’t want a real marriage is because he wants an easy way out?”
Shiloh started to laugh, but after a second, he realized she was serious. “My darling,” he said, soft and slow, “you have spent your entire relationship telling him how much you don’t want to get married. You’ve spent most of your life telling us how you’d rather die than be someone’s wife.”
Sarah covered her face with one hand and let out a shuddering sigh. “I know. I know that I’m…I’m not right in the head. And I wasn’t lying. Marriage scares the absolute piss out of me. My parents were so busy being obsessed with each other that they—” She stopped abruptly the way she always did when she brought up her parents.
If Shiloh hadn’t been there when everything had crashed down around her, he might have never known the full story.
“I’ve talked to Jules about it for hours. Days,” she groaned. “Until my throat hurt from sobbing and I had no tears left. And he knows that it’s my worst nightmare. I just…can’t help but wonder if the reason he didn’t put up a fight is because he knows I’ll be too much for him one day.”
Shiloh smiled and dropped his arm to the table, resting his cheek on it so he could look at her directly in the eye. “Maybe he didn’t put up a fight because the only thing in the world that matters to him is you being happy.”
“That scares me too,” she whispered. “I don’t want him to love me that much. That’s too much power.”
Shiloh hated how much he felt that, deep in his chest. He wondered how much Dom knew about his feelings. He wondered if Dom ever complained about Shiloh this exact same way to their other friends. More than once, Shiloh was convinced that people were looking at him with soul-deep pity because they understood just how in love he was and how hopeless he’d become.
But this wasn’t about him.
He reached out and stroked her cheek. “Let us take you out tonight. A proper piss-up. Fuck knows I could do with one, and you know Dom never says no.”
Sarah’s smile softened, and her eyes lit up. “No alcohol poisoning. I just got a massive online order that has to ship to the States, and half of them are custom soaps.”
“And I’ve got a lecture coming up about the Hittites…”
He stopped when her finger pressed over his lips. “No.”
He laughed, giving it a small kiss before he pulled away. “Get me drunk and you won’t be able to stop me.”
“Get me drunk and I’ll be willing to listen,” she said. She lifted up, then leaned down and pressed a kiss to his temple. “I love you so much. You know that, right?”
He propped his head up on his palm, elbow pressing into the table. Her tone was suddenly serious, and that worried him. “Of course I do. What brought that on?”
“Only that you’re such a good person, babes. Like…such a good person. You and Dom both deserve to be happy, and I wish…” She sighed, glancing away. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
It did matter, but he wasn’t going to ask her to finish her thought. He knew exactly where she was going with it. She just wanted them to be happy.
He thought about how she was trying to set Dom up on a date for the Halloween party, and he knew she wasn’t doing it to hurt him, even if it did. Even if she was responsible—indirectly—for every night Shiloh spent curled up under his duvet trying not to think about Dom on the date Sarah had talked him into making.
Between the two of them, Dom was the only one who hadn’t managed to convince Sarah to stop trying to manage their love lives. Dom insisted he was just humoring her, but Shiloh was starting to wonder if maybe he wasn’t.
