Page 271 of The Lies We Play

Only an inch.

He stops himself before the movement becomes a reach.

“If I could . . .” The words end there.

I look at him.

Something inside me responds before I can name it. A low note in a room I thought had been emptied.

“Let’s just be in a room,” I repeat.

His jaw works once. His eyes stay on mine. Then the corner of his lip lifts slightly into almost a smile. “This reminds me so much of the time Liv spent a semester in Paris.”

“How?”

“She was afraid we would’ve moved on,” he explains. “We were afraid she wouldn’t want to be with us anymore.”

“That’s—” I don’t know what to say, because I can’t remember the moment, but I feel the missing. I’ve felt the missing for years. I just didn’t know who was absent until now.

“Irrelevant,” he says. “This is much different. I missed you so fucking much.”

The sentence hurts in ways I can’t explain immediately.

The pain in his voice is soaked through, not poured on. It has lived in him long enough to become part of his breathing. He says it like a man who has carried the sentence for ten years and hates that the first thing he gives me is the wound.

My fingers curl against my thigh.

I want to apologize.

I want to ask for proof.

I want to say, ‘I missed you too,’ except I don't know if memory is required for missing or if the body is allowed to file its own testimony.

For a long time, neither of us tries to fill the air with language.

The room makes its small sounds. The refrigerator’s low hum in the kitchen. Rain ticking softly against the glass. A pipe somewhere inside the walls. The city beyond the windows, dimmed into a living blur. Two men breathing in the same room after ten years of not.

We are together.

And still, I feel the absence of someone else.

Her.

Livia.

But she is in the room because she is missing from it.

I find that I don't need to talk.

I find that I don't want to.

The part of me that has been performing language since I was old enough to be told that being Halston Saint Claire meant speaking well has gone quiet. In this apartment, the quiet is not a failure. It is permission. It is sitting in a room with another person and not having to make myself presentable to him before I am allowed to exist.

Creed lets me have that.

He doesn't ask what I remember.

He doesn't ask what I feel.