Page 170 of Finance Bros

I gently push him off me, and stare at Malcolm until we’re alone in the room with the door closed.

“Is the break over already?” I ask him.

He shoves his hands into his shorts pockets and presses his lips into a line. “Poor choice of words. Didn’t realize they were a trigger.”

“Me neither. But it turns out…” I trail off. I want to hug him, but I’m afraid he’ll turn any physical contact into a reason not to talk to me, and there are still things that need sorting out. The “break” being the main thing.

“I’m ready to talk,” he says.

I nod, still frozen in place.

“What we have—no wait—I shouldn’t say that,” he stammers. “What I feel for you isn’t anything close to what I felt for Kaylin. Even in the beginning. What I want with you and me is different, too.”

“How do you know?” I ask.

He sighs. “That’s not where I wanna start. Can we sit?”

I gesture to the bed, and he sits on the end of the mattress. I stick with my desk chair but roll it closer to face him.

He continues with his gaze on his folded hands. “I knew the job wasn’t for me by the end of the first week. I knew I hated basketball after two practices. I knew I wasn’t in love with Kaylin and never would be the first time she said the words to me. I might not always know what I want, but I can tell pretty quick when something’s not for me.”

I’m listening. I nod for him to go on.

“So that’s the timeline you asked about,” he says.

“If I hadn’t showed up when I did, would you have eventually married her?” I ask.

He counters with, “Would you have given a shit if I did?”

Of course I would have. It wouldn’t have hurt the way his initial rejection did, but it wouldn’t have felt good. “Yeah, but I wouldn’t have been surprised.”

“How’d you feel when you saw the ring?” he asks quietly.

I lean back and rub my mouth. “Scared.” It comes out as a whisper.

“But you trusted me?”

“It wasn’t easy,” I admit.

“But you did.”

“I wanna say I did a better job trusting you than you did trusting me today.”

“It’s not exactly a trust thing for me,” he says. “It’s more like insecurity. You don’t say a lot, Ryan, and when you do talk, I wonder sometimes if you’re just being nice.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Be nice to me?” he asks.

“No—just—blow smoke up your ass.”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I told you—I’m insecure when it comes to you. And I know it shows, and I guess I just wonder how long you’ll want to put up with it.”

“I’ve put up with worse from you,” I remind him.

“That’s not helpful,” he says.

“There’s nothing you could ever do to me that I wouldn’t forgive you for,” I tell him. “That’s what ‘I love you’ means when I say it to you.” I pause and consider him. The totality of him. All the things I know now, and what we’ve shared. “But maybe you need to hear something different.”

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