Page 57 of The Lies We Play

But this is different.

This is not hypothetical. This is not a joke sent across the roof with the bridge between us and consequences miles away. This is Livia wearing my jersey, sitting between me and a beautiful man in a charcoal suit, saying ‘we’ with her face open enough that I know she is scared too.

My mind doesn't blow apart.

Halston looks at her. Then at me. Then back at her.

“So you’d share me,” he says.

His voice is soft, but there is nothing weak in it.

“That a problem, Saint Claire?” Livia asks.

Then she shakes her head immediately. Because she hears herself; because underneath the bravery, she is still nineteen and careful with people when it matters.

“More like, would you be offended by it? I—we wouldn’t force it, of course.”

There she is.

Brave enough to open the door. Tender enough to panic, she opened it too hard.

Halston watches her for a second longer.

I watch him watch her.

Something in his face changes when he looks at Livia. It isn’t hunger, though there is that too. It’s attention. Total, quiet attention, like she has given him a sentence and he intends to understand every word before answering.

Then he looks at me.

His eyes meet mine.

The bar noise thins out.

For one second, I can see it clearly: he is not asking if I am a threat. He is asking if I am included.

I don't look away.

“No,” he says.

It is the simplest no I have heard a man deliver in my adult life.

No, not offended.

No, not a problem.

No, don’t close the door yet.

Livia’s hand moves on her glass. One small motion. Her fingers touch the condensation, then still.

I wonder if she knows she is holding her breath.

I wonder if I am.

James sets a beer down in front of me without asking what I want.

“On the house,” he says. “Good game.”

The normal interruption should break the moment.