I shove him away.
Both hands on his chest. Hard. He stumbles and catches the railing and there are three feet between us and those three feet feel like being flayed alive. My lips are swollen. I can taste him.
"Don't," I gasp. "Don't."
"Why?" He's raw. There's a red mark on his lip where I bit him. "Tell me why. The real reason. The thing you've been carrying this whole time that I can feel but you won't say."
"Because I'm barren."
The word hits the concrete and echoes.
I watch it land on him. Watch the word travel from his ears to his brain to his expression. Not disgust. Not pity. Just impact. The shock of a thing he wasn't braced for.
"I'm barren, Ray. I had a car accident when I was sixteen and the surgery that saved my life destroyed everything else. That scar you keep kissing — that's what it is. That's what it means."
"Miles—"
"That's what 'my body doesn't work' means. I said it at the resort and you didn't understand and I didn't explain because Icouldn't — I have never been able to say it out loud to anyone, not once in twelve years—"
The words are coming now and I can't stop them. I hear myself and I sound unhinged and I am unhinged, twelve years of locked-down silence breaking open in a stairwell with fluorescent lighting and the smell of industrial cleaner.
"I've been on suppressants since I was sixteen. Not because heats are inconvenient. Because what is the point of a heat when what the surgery took can't be undone? What is the point of slick and need and a knot that fills you up when the result is NOTHING? My womb runs the program perfectly — every hormone, every cycle, every desperate biological urge — and the output is zero. Empty. A dead end."
"That doesn't change—"
"You're pre-bonding to me." My voice cracks and I can't fix it. "I know. I've known for weeks. It's happening in my own body — I've read the research, Ray, I know exactly what's happening to us and I know how it ends. You are permanently attaching yourself to an omega who can never give you a family. Never. No pregnancy, no children, no future with a baby on your hip like you had with Noah at the Shaw firm—"
His expression. The way he looked when I said that. But I can't stop.
"You deserve what Kole has. What Devon has. The bond and the baby and the family dinner and the messy apartment full of toys and noise and LIFE. You deserve all of it and I can't — I can't give you ANY of it." I'm trembling. Everything is trembling and my voice is breaking apart. "I can't give you anything except a career I built because my body failed me and a partnership at a firm that won't even let me love you—"
I hear it. The word. Love. I said love. I didn't mean to say it and I can't take it back and it sits there in the air between us, honest and irreversible.
"—and it doesn't matter because love doesn't fix the fact that I am broken in the one way that actually—"
I stop. Because there's nothing left. I've said everything. Twelve years of silence and I've emptied it all onto the floor of this stairwell and there's nothing else inside me.
Ray is standing two feet away.
He's not speaking.
His eyes are wet. His jaw is tight and his fists are clenched at his sides and his mouth is working like he's trying to form a word and the word isn't coming. He's looking at me with an expression that isn't any of the things I was bracing for — not the careful clinical distance, not the gentle goodbye, not the recalculation of my value.
But he's not speaking. And the silence is the thing I've been waiting for since I was sixteen years old.
This is what happens when people find out. They go quiet. They absorb the information. They process. They look at you with wet eyes and a working jaw and they try to find a way to say this changes things that doesn't sound like you're less than what I wanted. My mother had this silence. My father had it. I've been waiting for Ray's version of it since the night he traced my scar with his thumb and I almost told him the truth.
"That's what I thought," I say. My voice is flat. Empty. The explosion is over and there's nothing behind it. "Please go."
"Miles — give me a second, you just — I'm trying to—"
"Go."
"I need a minute. You can't just say all that and then not let me—"
"Please." I wrap my arms around myself. I'm shrinking, pulling inward, the way I do when I need to disappear. "I need you to leave. Please."
He reaches for me. Reaching toward my arm. His fingers are unsteady.