We fall into silence for a stretch, until the light turns green and I pull forward. Then the thought slips out before I can dress it up. “It’s not easy, you know,” I say. “Thinking about her with you.”
“Then why the fuck did you say it was?” he demands.
I glance over at him, feeling the heat rise in my throat. “I didn’t say I’d get off on it, Jett. I said I’m okay with it. Because I love her. Because I want her happy. You ever see her laugh? Like really laugh? It changes her. She lights up. It’s rare. She hides so much pain behind all that chaos.”
Jett looks out the window, trying to keep himself from absorbing any of that. “You’re supposed to be the nice one,” he says. “Let Rhys make shit deep and weird. She wants to fuck him too. I don’t like that either.”
“Same.” I pull into the lot beside his bike and throw the car in park. “You still want to eat with me and Rhys?”
He glances at me, suspicious. “You gonna keep your feelings to yourself?”
“Probably not. Delilah’s locked up, and I’m feeling pretty raw about it.”
He runs a hand through his hair, sighs like the whole world’s a goddamn inconvenience. “Shit. Well, I’m hungry. And Rhys is expecting me.” He stares at me. “You didn’t have to do that. Not even for her. She wouldn’t have expected it. She expects us to be assholes and make her work for it.”
“I know,” I say. “But maybe it’s time we flipped it. Maybe we should be working for her affection. Proving she’s worth it. Because she’s been taught for way too long, maybe since she was a kid, that she’s not.”
Jett stares. Doesn’t speak.
“Could’ve started with her parents,” I add quietly.
“Yeah, okay,” he says. “Still sounds like Rhys’s job to sort out.”
“You love her?” I ask, voice low.
Jett stiffens. He doesn’t answer right away. “She’s mine.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He opens the door, conversation over, like the question’s too big to sit with. Then, without turning back he says, “Yeah.”
He slams the door shut and heads for his bike.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Jett
The burger place smells like fryer grease, stale beer, and whole lot of what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-here. It’s the wrong kind of bright inside. Fluorescent and buzzing. I haven’t eaten since before the arrest, and now I’m here, walking into a chain diner, like this is fucking normal, with the two men I’d most like to throw through a plate glass window.
Benji holds the door open like it’s a date.
Rhys is already at the booth, back straight, watching us approach with that clinical, disappointed-father look he gives me in therapy. Yeah. Go ahead. Analyze this shit.
I slide into the booth across from him. Benji sits beside me, the bench shifting under his weight. Cozy. Are we the “Team Delilah” delegation now? The ones who’ve… fuck. No. Don’t think about that.
I don’t know who I want to hate more. Rhys, who gets her trust and her secrets. Or Benji, who gets her body. Her voice cracking on his name. Her smile soft around him. Her chaos turned to goddamn devotion.
And he’s nice.
I want to hate him. I do. But he’s the kind of man who probably says “bless you” when a stranger sneezes and carries extra pens for people who forget theirs.
A waitress comes. Rhys orders a cheeseburger and fries like a guy who doesn’t spend his nights analyzing trauma or dodging inappropriate thoughts about his patients. Benji gets the same, but adds waffle fries and a side of cheese sauce like some kind of dairy hedonist.
What kind of man orders extra cheese sauce for a cheeseburger when the woman he loves is behind bars?
I ask for a burger and onion rings. No commentary. No substitutions.
I can feel Rhys mentally assigning personality profiles to each of our meals.
