Page 79 of Fool Me Twice

“Who is this?” He waved his sandwich at Hart.

“It’s me,” Hart said. “All of it is me.”

“Bullshit.”

Hart blew a breath out through his nose and swallowed his food, putting his fork down and crossing his fingers. “What makes you say that?”

Cane snorted, dropping his own food on the paper wrapping with a splat and leaning forward.

“Nobody can be two people at the same time.”

“I agree.”

Cane stared at him as he waited for elaboration.

Hart avoided his eyes for a moment, taking a few deep breaths before steeling himself and looking right at him. “The perfectly pressed, organized, polite Hart, the quotes and the motivational posters…isn’t an act. It’s not fake. Or made up. It’s not a version of me. It is me. It’s…a layer of me.”

“A layer?” Cane asked.

“Yes.” Hart was still playing with the perfectly ironed crease of his pants. Next to it was a mess of wrinkles from where he’d knelt on the floor. “It’s not that I struggle to be that. I like being that Hart. I like my clothes, and I like my order and the calm it brings me.”

“Then what the fuck was this?” Cane pointed to his cock, still out in the open, now soft on his lower belly.

“Another layer,” Hart said calmly.

“One nobody ever sees?”

“Exactly. Why would they? It doesn’t concern them. They can’t give me what I need like that, so I don’t see the point in them knowing.”

There was something about the way he said it, the small shifts Cane was so attuned to that made him certain Hart wasn’t telling him the whole truth. It irritated him. Worse than the burn on his chest. Worse than the faded scar of the identical one next to it.

“So why did you stop it?”

Hart startled. “Stop what?”

“Us,” Cane said. Hart sucked in an audible breath but didn’t answer the question that had sat between them all this time. One Cane had never asked. One Hart had never offered the answer for. “You showed me that side of you because I can give you what you need, but you’re the one who left things high and dry without a word. You stopped coming by. Stopped answering my calls.”

“You act like we were together and I suddenly disappeared. What we had was casual.”

Cane bared his teeth a little, yanking his pants up in anger. “It was never casual between us, and you know it. Two years isn’t casual.”

Hart looked away, unable to hold his gaze and deny it. Them.

“And then a whole fucking year went by, Hart, and I didn’t say a word,” Cane said. “I let you go because I knew you needed it, but maybe I want that explanation now.”

“Because I was slipping up,” Hart snapped. “I was getting sloppy with work because all I could think about was you and this and that put people in danger. Fix…”

He looked down at his lap.

“Fix called me one day. He called me to ask for help on a case while I was with you, and guess what? I didn’t answer. And guess what else? I didn’t even have my phone on that day, because I knew I was going to meet you and I’d started switching it off. Just for an hour or two. So we weren’t interrupted.” He scoffed at himself, blinking up at the ceiling before schooling his face.

“Do you know how horribly selfish that is? How big of a rule break that is? He got hurt because of me. Because I wasn’t there. Because I didn’t even have my phone switched on. That’s when I knew it had to stop. I couldn’t keep sneaking off to be with you and doing whatever I felt like. The job had to come first. People had to come first. So I ended it.”

“You’re not the first cursebreaker with a social life or a relationship,” Cane said, refusing to buy Hart’s rationalizations even though he understood them.

Fix was Hart’s family. Cane didn’t understand that concept too well, but he understood bonds. And guilt. This was more than that though. It always had been.

“So what was the real reason you slipped up, sweetheart? Was it because of this? Or was it because you were too busy trying to hide the fact that it existed in the first place to answer a call?”

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