“Oh, was that the problem? If I’d been a grad student or an adjunct, your bullshit would’ve been okay?” I tease.
“I think you’d have had a better handle on me.”
“I can’t imagine having a handle on you,” I tell him.
It gets another pause, another look.
“You can’t?”
“Not at all,” I say in a rush of honesty. “I think you’re a selfish dick and then you hold my hand through a panic attack and skip the dinner party you came for. I think you’re a macho meathead and then you let me wash your hair in the shower. I think you’re too charming and too friendly and too outgoing to notice anyone else, and then you bring me here, and you’re so much sweeter than I deserve—”
“Stop.”
I swallow, hard. My heart thumps and this place is so quiet it feels like the only sound.
“Everything we’ve done together was so we could emotionally manipulate someone else,” I say, quietly.
“Everything?” he asks.
“Most things,” I say, but that’s not right either. My heart keeps thumping. “Some things.”
“Not still.” It’s not a question.
“No.”
I take a deep breath against a sudden weight in my chest. I look up at the sky past the tops of the crumbling brick, feel the quiet around me. The way it smells of leaves and dirt. The way the sunlight pulses and shifts, clouds moving overhead, tall trees waving in and out of view.
“I had,” I say, and I have to stop because suddenly I’m about to cry so I bite my lip, take a deep breath. “Such a bad year.”
Silas doesn’t say anything and I squeeze my eyes shut, swallow twice in a row because I can’t believe I’m doing this. Here, now, when he brought me to this nice illegal place because he thought it would make me happy and here I am, fucking it up and crying—
But then he’s got his arm around me and he’s pulling me in. Tucking my head under his chin. Warm and solid as anything, and he just holds me tight.
“I know,” he says, his voice a rumble into my hair.
And God, I fucking lose it. I shove my face into his chest and try to drag a breath into my lungs, but it doesn’t work and I sob, ragged and gasping and ugly.
“I should have seen it coming,” I manage to get out, my voice high-pitched and trembling. “Evan wasn’t—I don’t know. He was nice to me and did things for me and looked at me and I was stupid and shy and I thought it was love because he’d chosen me. But then he didn’t. And—”
I breathe in for the first time, eyes still closed.
“—he must hate me,” I say, shaky. “Why else at our wedding? Why not ten minutes earlier? What did I do?”
Silas’s arms just tighten, his stubble digging into my scalp a little.
“It felt like he took everything,” I say. “Or—I let him have everything. He got our apartment. He got our friends, because even the ones who called me, I stopped calling back. He got our jobs because I couldn’t stand to be around him any more and then he got our lives because I moved down here to be closer to Anna Grace, because she felt like the one thing he couldn’t touch. And then he fucking came here and all I wanted was to make him suffer.”
I take a long, shaky breath, and exhale.
“What kind of monster wants that?” I whisper. It was fucked up of me and I know that, know that if I were the bigger person I’d forgive and forget and move on, but I couldn’t. I’ve never had it in me.
“One I wouldn’t fuck with,” Silas says after a moment. He’s got one arm slung over my chest, his other hand playing with my hair a little, tiny soothing tugs on my scalp.
“What?” I ask, after a minute.
“He backed you into a corner, what did he expect?” Silas says, so calmly it’s… surprising. “Of course you came at him, all teeth and claws. Who did he think you were?”
It’s a question I don’t have an answer to, a way I’ve never considered this before.