He was looking at me like I baffled him, and right now, not at all in a good way. “Desta, I don’t understand what happened. One moment things were going so well, and the next you acted like I was a stranger. If I did something to offend you—or worse, hurt you—I’m sorry. But the way you treated me? I didn’t deserve that.”

My face burned from humiliation. He was right. He hadn’t deserved that. For all that I agonized about not wanting to put my baggage on other people, I’d done just that, and during a time when he’d needed me to be a friend.

I opened my mouth to say I was sorry, but instead I overshared.

“I didn’t want to add to what you were already dealing with. Your dad is sick, and you’ve got all kinds of decisions to make.” I lifted my hands up, not sure where I was going with my rambling. “And then there’s the fact that it’s not even safe for you to be doing this. I didn’t want to make your life harder.”

He exhaled and grabbed at his curls the way I’d seen him do whenever a conversation got intense. “So instead of telling me that, you shut me out and took away my choices? You don’t have to save me from myself or otherwise, Desta.”

With every word out of this mouth, I felt more and more ashamed of how I’d acted. He looked up at the pointed ceiling of the cottage and took a long breath before he continued. “You know what hurt the most about Byron?”

I shook my head, but he was still looking up. “It wasn’t the ugly things he said. It was that he thought he knew better than me. That he believed I couldn’t decide on my own what I did and didn’t want.” He lowered his eyes to me then, and I felt sorry for putting the hurt in them. “You don’t think I know the risks? That this has never come up for me?”

“Of course you do.”

The laugh he let out was brittle and jaded, and I wanted the earth to swallow me up. “I know exactly what it meant to reach for you. To make love to you. The risks I was taking. But I took them anyway because I wanted you. Because I thought you could see me and want me without turning me into something you had to save.”

That cut the deepest because I deserved it.

“I’m so fucking sorry, Elias.” It seemed like such a trite thing to say. “That sounds so stupid.”