Page 58 of Beautiful When He Breaks

“Okay.”

He nods too many times, slings the bag over one shoulder, and reaches for his keys. His movements are all wrong now. Jerky and careful in the wrong places—he’s one second from bolting and knows it.

Eli’s halfway turned away when I catch myself and say, “Hey,” and he freezes.

I don’t know why I say it. I don’t have a plan past the word. I just know I can’t let him leave with whatever the hell that was hanging between us.

He turns back around slowly, his face calmer now by sheer force, but not enough to fool me. His eyes won’t stay on mine for more than a second, and his mouth is set too tightly. He looks guilty. Mortified, maybe. And underneath all of that, still a little heated in a way that makes my pulse kick stupidly hard again.

I have no idea what to do with it. So, I do what I always do when I’m scared about having seen something too precious to name: I back off.

“You need me to grab anything before I come home?” I ask.

Relief flashes across his face so quickly it almost hurts me. “Uh—no,” he says, voice still a little rough.

Then he’s gone.

The locker room door swings shut behind him, and I’m left standing there alone with my towel hanging loose and my heart beating far too rapidly for a conversation that technically never even happened.

I stare at the place where he was and try to make sense of what I saw. Maybe I imagined it, and he was spacing out, so my ego—starved and pathetic—made it into something else. Maybe all of this is a trick of bad timing and my own stupid hope. That would be the safest answer. The smartest one. The one least likely to wreck what little balance we’ve clawed back together between us.

The problem is that I know what it looked like and what it did to me when I caught him looking.

I lean back against the locker and drag both hands through my damp hair, breathing out slowly through my nose. The air in the room feels charged now and won’t settle no matter how hard I tell it to.

I think about the past few weeks. The way Eli’s been around me lately. The subtle weirdness. The almost-questions on his face. The day at the pediatrician when he didn’t correct the doctor for calling me his partner. I chalked it up to stress and now, suddenly, revisit each moment with a lot more interest.

That does not help. If anything, it makes everything more dangerous.

Because if I’m right, if what I saw just now was real, then this thing I’ve spent years burying under friendship and silence and self-loathing just shifted in a way I don’t know how to survive. And if I’m wrong, if I read heat into a glance because I wanted to, then I’m exactly the bastard I’ve always been afraid of becoming—someone who mistakes kindness and closeness for invitation because wanting has made him stupid.

Either way, I’m fucked.

I should let it go—that’s the smart move. But my touch-starved brain won’t let me.

18

Eli

I should be asleep.

That’s the thought I keep having while I lie on my back in the dark and stare at the ceiling. The room is quiet except for the soft white noise machine near Mila’s bassinet and the occasional little sound she makes in her sleep, the kind that still makes my body go alert before I remember she’s fine.

She’s down for the night. Mrs. Alvarez left hours ago. The house has gone mostly still. Even Ryan finally shut the hell up downstairs sometime around midnight. I know I should be asleep. Instead, I’m lying here thinking about Julian.

That in itself shouldn’t be weird. He’s my best friend. I’ve thought about him plenty over the years, in all the ordinary ways people think about someone who’s been woven through their life that long. I’ve thought about him constantly since Mila came into my life because he’s there for all of it, and half the time when something happens with her, my brain reaches for Jules before it reaches for anybody else.

That part doesn’t scare me. The part where I’m alone in bed and replaying what happened in the locker room does.

Those stupid, impossible seconds when I looked at him, and something in me went hot and undeniable. Then I tried not to look at him too much during dinner while also trying not to feel twelve different kinds of guilt every time he spoke to Mila in that low, easy voice of his, and my whole body decided to notice.

I roll onto my side and immediately regret it because now I’m facing the bassinet and all the evidence of the life I’m supposed to be thinking about instead. Mila. Bills. The next appointment. Practice. My parents. The lawyer. Real things. Big things. Important things.

Not Julian’s shoulders.

Not Julian’s chest.

Not the lines of ink disappearing down his sides to under the towel around his waist.