Daisy springs to her feet. “I’m going to let you two talk. I can take Moffy and Jane to their nurseries.” Ryke watches her collect both tired babies from the playpen, and his normally hard eyes soften a fraction the longer they pin to his girlfriend.
He scratches his unshaven jaw and turns back to me when she disappears upstairs. “How’d this get out in the fucking media?” How.
“It hasn’t yet…”
His brows jump. “So everything’s okay?” He knows it’s not. I wouldn’t have called him if it was.
I shrug. “You tell me.” I’m referring, of course, to his knowledge of my past. Sitting in this silence, with the weight of the truth, feels like a forty-ton pendulum swinging at my chest.
He holds my gaze. “I was fucking surprised when Daisy told me what you said to her, but that’s all I was.”
I have a hard time believing this, and I wear the doubt in the corners of my eyes.
Ryke notices, and he lets out a deep breath. “Look, I may speak harshly, we may disagree on more fucking things than we can ever agree on, but after years of, I don’t know what to call it…I guess shit we’ve plowed through together…I’ve realized that you care about other people just as much as me. You can twist it how you want, but the truth is, half of what you’ve ever done has been to protect someone else. And you’re good with words, so what’s the definition of that, Connor?”
Selfless.
A trait I’d never claimed before. It’s still hard to now.
He continues, “When Daisy told me that you’d slept with a guy before, I was shocked but I wasn’t fucking disgusted; I wasn’t repulsed. I didn’t question your feelings towards my brother or me. I can differentiate when someone fucking cares about a person and when someone’s sexually attracted to them. I was just surprised.”
I rub my lips, my eyes clouding. “I wish I could say I thought better of you all this time, but I sincerely thought you’d put a hundred-foot barrier between your brother and me.” To protect Loren. From me.
It’s something Jonathan Hale has tried to do, and maybe this is all his doing…maybe he’ll finally succeed. Lo knows about me. He accepts me, but I imagine other people won’t be as understanding, as comprehending, of my relationship with him anymore.
Ryke shakes his head and rests his forearms on his knees. “There was a time I didn’t trust you, but never because I believed you were into him like that. You’re manipulative as fuck, and he’s…fragile.”
“I know,” I say. “It’s why I was easy on Lo when you were hard on him.”
Ryke nods, understanding how I only tried to brace Lo from falling over every time Ryke needed to push him. We’d been at odds with each other for so long, disagreeing on how to treat a recovering alcoholic. His brother. My best friend.
“So tell me,” I say, “if you were in my position, what would you say to the media?”
“I would tell them to fuck off.”
“Of course you would.”
He almost smiles. “Come on, Cobalt, you don’t take fucking advice from dogs.” It’s his attempt at cheering me up—because it’s obvious to him that I’m knee-deep in quicksand and sinking fast.
“You are not a dog, my friend.” I lean forward to refresh the Celebrity Crush site, my laptop sitting next to Ryke.
“Don’t mess with the status quo.”
The status quo has already been trampled over a hundred times in the past forty minutes, a fucking carcass of what it once was. Not even I can reverse time to put it back together again.
A brand new headline appears on the landing page of Celebrity Crush, and my world comes to a standstill, an unquantifiable moment with a stagnant heartbeat.
The headline: Connor Cobalt has slept with men! Marriage to Rose Calloway called into question!
My phone rings incessantly, as though someone close to me has died. I imagine the calls belonging to board members of Cobalt Inc. and my father-in-law and every person who knows me, wanting a quote or an answer. The whys and the hows and the who knews all tangled together.
Half of their headline is true. I can’t deny my past, but they have warped it in a criminal way, invalidating the one thing that has meant the most to me.
I struggle to read the article, to accept the permanence of the situation. I breathe through my nose, my jaw tensing. Read the fucking article, Connor. I stare unblinkingly at the computer screen. I stare faraway, disappearing beyond the words.
I need to read it, but I’m afraid.
Loving someone else isn’t easy. It doubles pain. It doubles worry. It doubles sentiments that I dislike in one dose. Loving someone else is a complex web of emotions, trying to ensnare me.
And I’ve been caught before.
When Rose went into labor, I truly thought this may be the day where I lose everything. Stuck on a freeway in my limo, her survival rested in my hands. I was terrified at the idea of losing love. Love—of all sentiments, of all things. It’s a gut-wrenching, nearly debilitating idea, and I tried to push it away as I delivered our daughter and while Rose bore the pain.
People called me a hero, but I never felt more human.
I suddenly feel a hand slide on my shoulder and a body sinks beside me. I look to my left, and Rose curls her fingers around mine. I wear apologies in my eyes, but her enflamed, narrowed gaze pins to the laptop screen, prepared to battle things that I’ve let drive over me.
“Have you read it yet?” she asks, lifting the computer off my lap. I notice Ryke standing to greet Loren and Lily in the foyer.
“Not yet,” I breathe.
“We’ll read it together then.” Her voice trembles, her yellow-green eyes alight with destruction.
I hold her closer to my side, bracing her stiff frame to my body. I focus again on the article, and I graze over information Henry has already explained, exact names of my exes never written or mentioned. Just “a source” and “we’ll reveal more as the story continues to break”—meaning this isn’t the end.
I land on the words that surprise me the most. Rose inhales sharply, reading it too.
Sources claim that Connor Cobalt knew the truth would be exposed soon. It explains why—for the past four months—he’s been amplifying any public displays of affection towards his wife. To name just a few: he went down on his wife in a parking lot back in January, visited a sex store in February, and performed a striptease in March.
It’s all been an act to fool people.
What we believe: they’re not in love. Their marriage is nothing more than a business arrangement. Celebrity Crush has reached out to the Calloways and Cobalts respective representatives and neither has issued a statement yet, but we’re certain someone will speak out soon. And when they do, we’ll be here to report it. So stay tuned.
I shut the laptop violently, and I stand, clasping Rose’s hand in mine before she can even speak. I lead her out of the living room, her rigid body moving mechanically, in the daze that I’ve been crawling through for the past five minutes.
I’m more awake now. They’re spinning our game—everything we’ve done in the past four months to protect the babies—around on us. They flipped the script, yanking guns out of our hands and pointing them directly at our heads.
Our six-month plan just backfired.
I saw consequences and the risk. There was always a cost attached. I’m not foolish to believe it was ever infallible. By nature, tests are meant to fail or they’re meant to succeed.