The hotel room was dead quiet. I paced back and forth across the living room while they watched, heads turning back and forth as if they were watching a tennis match.

“So. Which one of you is going to go first?”

Neither of them answered, but they both flinched back when I stopped my pacing to glare at them. “Fine. If you two don’t want to decide, I will. Elizabeth… what the fuck have you been doing for the last year that you haven’t been telling me?” I was swearing again, and it annoyed me, but I needed words strong enough to convey how completely and utterly pissed off I was in that moment.

“Ah… okay.” Elizabeth drew in a deep breath, glancing at Clint, before pushing it out in a defeated sigh and starting her story.

“When you saw Kisten with Clint, it broke something inside you, Joe. Maybe you don’t realize quite how bad it was- but I do. You wouldn’t talk, or come out of your room, you would barely eat and only when I shouted at you for an hour. You were so broken, Joe.” Tears glistened in her eyes.

“All I could think about for the first few weeks was how you had been getting better that week before. That you’d actually let me touch you after Kisten shocked the shit out of you. I was so proud of you, for starting to get over your fear, for letting somebody get close to you. Seeing you revert, seeing you worse than before, broke my heart.

“That’s why I kept the phone. It was my only link to the Joe that was wearing proper clothes and smiling and driving a car with the top down!”

I felt a twinge of pain and guilt as she spoke. I’d never thought about how I was making her feel in all those months before I was snapped out of it. “Right. So you never realized it was going off all the time?”

“Well… I mean, I heard it vibrate a few times. But I never charged it so it died pretty fast. It’s been in the front pocket of my suitcase since I took it,” she admitted, her gaze shifting to the floor and her cheeks turning pink.

“That half explains that bit. And what about cutting me off from all the people from the apartment without telling me?”

“I was afraid you would relapse,” Elizabeth said quickly. “I was terrified that if you saw anybody from the apartment- god forbid it be Clint or Kisten- you’d just be reminded of how much you were hurt there, and you would fall right back into barely eating and sleeping. I thought I was doing it for your own good. I thought that if I told you, it would remind you just as much as the people themselves would.”

“Bullshit!” Clint was halfway to his feet when the pillow I threw smashed into his face. He sat back down abruptly, looking shocked. Recovering quickly, he crossed his arms over his chest, looking away from both of us with his nose in the air.

“Alright. I can see how that would have made sense to you,” I allowed. Her face started to brighten, but I was quick to kill that before it could take root. “But that doesn’t mean I think you were right in what you did. That phone wasn’t yours, Elizabeth, and if it was ringing you should have given it to me. God knows what I would have heard from any one of those messages.

“And the measures you set up to protect me were going to far. If you had talked to me, I would have agreed to most of them. I might have been a bit more selective with exactly who I kept away, but I would have had no problem keeping most of your security measures.

“But you lied to me, Elizabeth, even if it was by omission. You know how hard it is for me to trust people, and you still did it. I… I don’t know how to feel about you anymore.” I quickly brushed away the tears that threatened to spill over, watching the ceiling until the burn of more tears went away.

Elizabeth was crying when I looked back. Her hands were in her lap, her lips pressed tightly together, her makeup running. She didn’t make a noise, but her shoulders shook with silent sobs. I would have felt bad for her if I was anybody else. But… she’d taken away one of the most important things in my life when she broke the trust I had placed in her.

“Please go get that phone, Elizabeth, and plug it in to charge. I don’t know if I’ll want to listen to those messages when we’re done. But at the very least, I’ll be able to delete them at the end.”

Clint made an offended noise, but Elizabeth quickly got to her feet and ran to her bedroom. When she was gone, I focused my attention solely on Clint. My eyes narrowed, my hands settling on my hips. He cringed back into the couch, his hazel eyes going wide. I was pulling out the famous glare again, and even Clint couldn’t stand against it.

“Your turn, Clint. But first, give me one good reason why I should listen to you at all.”

He took a deep breath, let it out, and repeated a few times with his gaze on the floor. When he looked up at me, his mouth was set and his eyes were hard. “You should listen to me because Kisten loves you, but he doesn’t love himself enough to hunt you down to speak to you in person.”

My heart jumped into my throat. He was lying, had to be. Of course he was. If Kisten loved me, he wouldn’t have slept with somebody else while I was gone for a week- just a week. It wasn’t my fault the kid couldn’t keep himself together.

“F-fine,” I said, the word slipping out before I could stop it. There was no turning back then, so I pretended I had meant to say it. “I’ll let you talk. But once you’re done, you walk out that door and you don’t ever come back. Deal?”

A bright, grateful smile spread across Clint’s face, and for almost half a second I could see what might have led Kisten to- and then it was gone, wiped away by the anger brought on by even the beginning of that thought. “Deal!” Clint said quickly, sensing my change of mood.

It was too late to pull out of the deal, so I resigned myself to listening to whatever he had to say. Sitting in the chair farthest away from him, I crossed my legs and waited.

“That day… it’s not what you think. Kisten knows he made a huge mistake, kissing you that soon. Or maybe he didn’t, from what Elizabeth said, and you would have been warmer when you came back. But he didn’t know that. He loved you, and he was damn sure he’d messed it up. So he started to spiral.”

“Spiral?” I questioned, frowning slightly.

Clint nodded. “It’s this bad habit Kisten has. He’s always… he’s always been hated by his father because he was born from an affair his mother had with another man. So he was used to being hated, despised, and a part of him will always believe he’s the filthy creature his father always said he was. There are times when that overwhelms him. He’ll drink, he won’t sleep, he’ll eat the shittiest food- basically, he’ll try to tear himself apart.”

I couldn’t breathe. My eyes were wide, and I had a hand pressed to my throat. He sounded so much like me that it hurt. Clint noticed, and gave me a soft smile.

“I met him when he was in one of those downward spirals. The only way you can pull him out of it is to force him to realize there’s somebody who loves him. And since Kisten is a very physical person- he wasn’t touched much as a child, so he always craves contact- sex is usually the only way to show it in a way he can’t refute.

“So when I saw how much he was hurting, I was afraid that you wouldn’t be able to give him that. I respected your fear of being touched. I sort of… took one for the team.”

My eyebrows climbed nearly into my hairline. Taking one for the team my foot. As if sleeping with Kisten was a burden- and there went my thoughts again, running into places they didn’t need to be.

“Trust me, Joe, it wasn’t what he wanted. He cried while he… while he…” Clint looked down, rubbing his eyes- trying not to cry. “And when he shouted a name, Joe, it was yours. I was just somebody who he could touch. I wasn’t who he wanted.

“And then… you finally decided to come back, and you had the worst timing. Kisten’s heart shattered in the hallway when you slammed the door on him. He hid in his room for months, moping, the little ass. He didn’t get any better no matter what any of us tried to do; the only time he went out of the apartment was when a certain somebody published a new book. Otherwise he was sitting on the couch, staring at his cell on the table… waiting for a call back to his hundreds of messages that would never come.”

My hands were clenched into fists, and I shook my head with my eyes closed. I didn’t want to admit that Kisten could have been hurting as much as me. Kisten had been the one that did wrong… right?

Clint made a chiding sound that said I was being idiotic, the same sound Elizabeth made when I changed my draft by taking out forty pages in the middle. “He only came out of it when his father died and he was called to take over the business. And even then… even now… he’s a zombie, Joe. He has nightmares, and he always calls your name. It’s broken my heart so many times over, and I can’t stand it anymore.

“That’s why I came to find you. But I don’t expect you to believe a word I said.” Clint stood, and started to the door. He stopped in the hallway, meeting my eyes. “Just listen to the messages, Joe. They’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

Then the door closed, and Clint was gone.

“Joe, it’s powered up enough to- where’d the asshole go?” Elizabeth peeked her head around the corner from her room.

I was up in a flash, striding across the hotel room. She jumped out of the way as I came close to shoving past her, making straight for the phone. There were so many messages- six hundred and seventy-seven missed calls- that I doubted all those voice messages would still be there. But I could at least listen to the last one he left for me.

“Could I have a minute alone?” I asked softly.

Elizabeth’s expression soured, but she nodded; the door closed harder than I expected, making me jump slightly. The shock was immediately lost as I focused on the phone. I dialed the number to get to my voicemail, and punched in the password, before pressing the phone to my ear to hear Kisten’s last words to me.