“You never let me explain what happened,” he says.

I can’t meet his eyes. It goes so much deeper than this, but even though these details seem tiny now, I know it’s where we have to start. “You said you loved me that night,” I remind him, “for the first time.”

He nods eagerly. “I know.”

“You asked me to marry you.”

Elliot reaches for my arm, circling his fingers around my wrist. “I meant it. I had a ring.”

I look at him in shock. “If I’d said yes, would you still have fucked Emma?”

“Okay.” He stands, pulling his pants up, buckling his belt. “Okay.” His shirt hangs loose, hair remains a mess from my fingers. Elliot looks down at me, backlit by the moon and the distant glow of the party. Bending to retrieve his glasses, he slides them on. “Do you know how many times I’ve told you this story in my head?”

“Probably about as many times as I’ve tried to pretend I didn’t see what I saw.”

He crouches. “I didn’t know what happened until a few days later.”

“What?”

“I mentioned to Christian that you hadn’t called me back, and he said, ‘Probably because she saw Emma naked on top of you.’ ”

I blink away. I still see the image, so clearly.

“And the worst bit of that,” he says quietly, “is that until he said it, I didn’t know I’d been with Emma. She wasn’t there in the morning.”

I need to digest this for two, three, four breaths. “You woke up with your pants at your knees, Ell. That didn’t clue you in?”

“This is the part I can’t figure out,” he whispers. “In my head, it was you. In my head, you came up to the party, you found me passed out on Chris’s bed. In my head, you went down on me, climbed on top of me. I don’t remember having sex with Emma that night. I remember having sex with you.”

“Can you hear yourself?” I stare at him, mouth agape. Inside my rib cage, my heart is a barreling thunder at the words went down on me. I never went down on him—but she did? “Do you hear the bullshit meter screaming in the background? You’re telling me that the night you had sex with Emma, you thought it was me?”

Elliot groans, raking a hand through his hair. “I realize how insane it sounds. Even at the time, I couldn’t piece the night together, and I’ve had eleven years to try to make sense of it. I was so drunk, Mace. I remember waking up to the feel of your mouth on me. I remember touching your hair, talking to you, encouraging. And when I look back, I still see your face when she climbed on me.”

He shakes his head, squeezing his eyes closed, and when he says this, I remember what Brandon started to say, something about how Elliot wouldn’t.

“I woke up,” he continued, “and had a moment of blistering embarrassment because Chris’s bedroom door was open and a few people were walking around cleaning shit up. I was all alone with my dick hanging out. I texted you asking where you’d gone. Two days I went along with things, thinking I’d had drunk sex with my girlfriend at a party. I thought you were embarrassed or angry at me for being so wasted, and that’s why you hadn’t called.”