Page 86 of Unlocked Dive
I stalk the plush room, resenting the romantic glow of the gilded lamps as the story spills out in his low voice and sparing words. Gabe as the new guy at Cici and Reggie’s warnings. The slow seduction and Byrd’s naiveté. And then the inevitable decay, colored in shades of narcissism I know regrettably well. A showcase Gabe wanted. A teacher who convinced Byrd toaudition against him. Jealousy and gaslighting and vindictive betrayal, ultimately leaving Gabe pettily unscathed and Byrd a cautious, ever-careful supplicant when he should have been a god.
“I hope Reggie busted you with the biggest ‘I told you so,’” I mutter when he finally runs dry, turning from the city skyscape at the massive window.
“Not until later,” he admits. “At first, she was too busy picking up the pieces.”
“You loved him.”I hate this.
“I was infatuated with him. At the time, it felt like the same thing. Now I know better.” His eyes beg understanding, even as his shoulders slump with the expectation of rejection. My feet carry me across the room until my fingers can tangle in his hair and tilt his face to meet my gaze.
“Ask me anything,” he says. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
I already know too much.
“How could you fall for his shit?” The question bursts out of me, layered with the roots of betrayal and the creeping sprouts of my own self-doubts. “How could you lethim, of all people, hurt you like that?”
He circles my wrist with one hand and rubs a thumb over my fallen angel’s wings.
“How could you?” he asks softly.
The question sinks into my scars and clogs my throat with bitter irony.
“I was twenty-one,” he sighs, relenting. “Like I said, I didn’t know any better.”
Fucking ouch.
I release his head with more force than probably necessary and stalk back to the window.
“Right. Because twenty-one-year-olds don’t know shit about their own feelings.” I round on him, tendrils of fury spiraling over my skin. “That’s why you didn’t believemewhen I said I loved you. Why you kept trying to reject me for my ‘own good.’ Because I’m just a fuckingchildto you. No wonder you felt so guilty about wanting to stick your dick in me.”
“I never thought of you as a child.” He stands and moves as if to come to me but stops when I shake my head in warning. “Understand something, Echo. I wasn’t like you at your age. I wasn’t out and confident in my sexuality. I didn’t draw attention as effortlessly as breathing. I was barely figuring out what my attraction to men meant.”
My heart lurches at the unexpected compliment buried in the confession, but he barrels on. “Gabriel was the first man to ever return that attraction. It was addictive, overwhelming. And he was…” He trails off, scrubbing a hand through his hair, and a bitter sound escapes him as his fingers tangle in the hair tie.
“What? What was he?”Why am I asking? Do I really want to hear about Gabe’s fucking charms?
“He was magnetic. Needy and unattainable in this contradictory way. You couldn’t not want his attention. And when you had it…” He pulls the elastic from his ruined bun with an impatient shake of his head. “He made me feel special.”
I’m crumbling, a devastating slide into shattered pieces that ache for the fragile dream of lost potential.
“Youarespecial.”
This time, when he closes the space between us, I don’t retreat, letting his arms come around me and resting my forehead in the crook of his neck. He smells like floral hotel shampoo and starlit skies.
He smells like Byrd.
“I’m not perfect, Echo. I never was. You put me on a pedestal I couldn’t possibly live up to.”
“Fuck you,” I mumble into his skin. “I never put you on a pedestal, and I never asked you to be perfect.” My hands come up to push him away but curl into his waistband instead. “You were always perfect forme.”
But I did expect perfection from him—when I asked him to fix me. When I dumped all my useless, broken pieces in his lap and used them to blackmail him into loving me back. I made him wantme, when all he really wanted was to help.
“You’rethe perfect one,” he murmurs. “You let me explore my own power without ever giving up any of your own, and it showed me a kind of love I never knew was possible.” He buries his face in my hair and clutches me desperately tight. “But I lose myself in you. I can’t think straight when we’re in bed together, and—”
“I don’t want you thinking when we’re in bed together. Especially notstraight.”
He laughs, a breathless, hopeless rush of air across my skin.
“I never wanted to be another person who disappointed you,” he whispers, tracing subtle patterns along my spine. “Everyone you’ve ever looked up to has let you down. Including me.”
