Page 103 of What We Bury

“No.” His chest is heaving. His eyes wet and furious. “Not this time.”

“Micah—”

“You don’t get to do that.” His voice cracks down the middle and he doesn’t try to hide it. “You don’t get to blow your whole life up and then use my mouth to feel better about it. I’m not your pressure valve, Eli. I’m not the thing you reach for when it all gets too loud and then walk past at the bar like furniture for another two months.” He drags a breath. “I’ve done that. I’vebeenthat. For years. I’m done.”

I stand against the wall with copper on my tongue and nothing to say, because every word of it is true.

“I want her. I want her so bad I can’t see straight.” His voice steadies, and that’s worse. “And I’d want this—you, me, all of it—if you ever once let yourself reach for the actual thing instead of the version you can have in the dark and pretend didn’t happen.”

I bite down until I taste more copper. He’s right. He’s always right, and I hate him for it—for cutting through every story I tell myself, every careful category, every line of moral algebra, straight to the root:I want.I want, and I hate that I want, and I want more than a man like me gets to keep.

“It’s complicated,” I say. The coward’s word, and we both know it.

“It’s really not.” He’s not stepping toward me now. That’s the part that guts me—he’s keeping the distance himself. “Everyone keeps treating her like a prize to split up, and she’s not, she’s aperson.But you don’t get to punish me for being the one who showed up when she needed someone. And you don’t get to make some noble little exit and call the wall you’re hiding behind a sacrifice.”

“You don’t know what I’m doing.”

“I know exactly what you’re doing. You’re scared, so you’re calling it strength.” He shakes his head. “You did it in the stairwell. You did it just now with this jacket. You feel the thing—and then you leave. You always leave.”

“Someone has to be the one who?—”

“Who what? Suffers? Holds it together? Stays above it?” His voice drops. “You’re not above it. You’re in it. Same as me. Same as all of us.”

My hands are shaking. I drive my nails into my palms until the bite pulls me back.

“If I let this happen,” I say, low, every word costing me something I won’t get back, “I don’t know how to do it halfway. I don’t know how to want her, and share her, and be okay with—” I gesture between us, at the club, at the whole impossible shape of it. “—with all of it.”

“None of us know how,” Micah says. “That’s the point. We figure it out together or not at all.”

We stare at each other. Neither of us moves.

“She asked about you,” he says, quieter. “After you left that morning. First thing out of her mouth. Notam I in trouble.Notis he angry.Just—is he okay.” He swallows. “She cares about you, Eli. The least you can do is be brave enough to try.”

The stone in my chest cracks. A fissure. Just enough to let the hurt bleed through.

“Go back inside,” I say. It comes out wrong—broken, rough, nothing like the order I meant.

He looks at me a long moment. Then he crosses the distance, and instead of shoving the jacket at me, he holds it out. Waiting for me to take it like a person instead of refuse it like a coward.

I don’t take it.

Something in his face closes.

“You’re too much of a coward to have her,” he says, “and too selfish to let her go.” He dumps the jacket at my feet. “Figure out which one you can live with.”

He goes back inside. The door slams. The alley’s quiet again—garbage and rain and the far-off hum of traffic.

I stand there a long time.

Then I kick the shit out of the trash cans.

TWENTY-EIGHT

SAGE

Knox is waiting outside when I push through the diner door at close, leaning against the building like he’s been there for hours.

He looks at me. I melt.