Page 137 of Piece Us Together

Not that Maison is looking at me, anyway. He’s currently caught in the thrall of our sexy professor dom boyfriend. It has me smiling wider.

“Then we can keep talking,” Maison says. “If it can stop when I need it to, if things get too much, then we can keep going.”

Hunter smiles. It’s pleased. Proud. I see the moment it hits Maison, nearly bowling him over with the power of it. Warmth rushes through me at the sight.

“I’d like to go get a notebook.” He rolls his eyes at himself. “I’m a nerd, I know. It makes me feel better to take notes. Do you mind?”

Maison shakes his head as I say, “No, sir.”

The moment Hunter is out of the room, Maison’s eyes snap to mine. His eyes are wide with something close to panic. I step up to the breakfast counter and put my hand over his. “What’s wrong?”

“He’s going to want to know.”

I frown. “Know?”

“Know,” he says, more urgently. His free hand goes to his chest. I can see the outline of his tags beneath the fabric of his shirt. “Know everything.”

“He deserves to, doesn’t he?”

“I’m not ready, Nol.”

I look at him. At the fear in his eyes. The heaving of his chest. The shake of his fingers beneath mine. I remember him looking at the door like he wanted to run. I remember how red his eyes were last night. I remember how he said he’d sobbed.

Hunter has worked magic in ways I’ve never thought possible with this beautiful, stubborn, self-sacrificing man that I love. He can’t keep doing that if Maison shuts him out. It’s not my place to say, though. We might be a unit, but Maison’s trauma is his.

“I’m not hiding my truth from him. If he doesn’t ask tonight, I won’t bring it up, but I will soon, Mais. I would never tell your part of the story, I’ll work around it, leave you out, but I’m not ashamed of what I’ve been through. Isurvived. I’m proud of that. I want to share that with him.”

Emotions flicker over his face before he ducks his head to hide it from me. Hunter would grab him by the chin and force him to look, but I’m not Hunter. I don’t want to be. I know myself well enough to know I can’t carry that weight. Not for long, at least. I’m not built for it. Especially not the kind of weight Maison needs help with.

“You deserve to share that,” he says quietly. “Of course. I just—it’s not like that for me.”

“You survived. I don’t care that you were an operative, you’re a survivor too.” I lean toward him, heart aching. “Yousurvived, Mais. You’re right here. With me.”

He looks up at me. I realize I was wrong for wanting him to do that before. The pain in his eyes is so intense, I feel it echo inside of me, scraping me raw.Oh, Maison.

“Here we go,” Hunter says, entering the room again with his notebook, pen, and glasses. He’s rolled his sleeves to his elbows and loosened the buttons near his throat. It’s a gut punch, the arousal I suddenly feel mixing with the heartache of the moment. He freezes the second his eyes fall on us, his entire demeanor shifting. “What’s wrong?”

Maison straightens, his face already shifted to form a heartbreakingly convincing smile. “Nolan can’t remember the recipe.”

And—okay. See, I really want to press the issue. I really want to call him out and tell Hunter something is wrong and make Maison face whatever the hell just had him looking the way he did a minute ago.

But—“I donotforget recipes.”

“I don’t know,” he says with a teasing smirk that I hate for being real.How does he do that? Where does he stuff all of it down? What does it do, way down there in the dark? Come back as nightmares? Manifest as deep-seated fear?“Looks like you forgot this one. I don’t see any cooking.”

I eye him for a moment, still debating what to do.

It’s not my place, though. I love him. I support him. But it’s not my place. Calling him out would be calling out his trauma—or close enough to be unfair.

“I need a wine opener,” I tell Hunter.

He slowly sits back down where he was before, his eyes flitting between the two of us. “To the left of the stove, second drawer.”

I grab the bottle of wine and head there, glad it gives me an excuse to have my back to them.

There’s a long stretch of silence. The pop of the cork coming out of the bottle nearly startles me from how quiet the room is.When I glance over my shoulder, I see Hunter with his head against Maison’s temple, Maison glaring down at his wrapped hands on the counter. He says something, soft and low, and Maison’s eyes fall closed, his shoulders softening.

Hunter smiles.

---