“He knows,” I said, pacing the room. “He fucking knows everything that happened at that bar. Probably knows about the fight too. Patrick is poisoning his mind!”

Hank set the last box of clothing down in the hall. He took hold of my shoulder, eagerly glancing toward the bathroom to see my pills scattered across the sink. “Don’t worry. I took my meds,” I said, sighing.

Hank sat down on a stack of boxes and wiped the sweat off his face. “You talking about Patrick?” he asked.

There was no getting through to Patrick. His memory was skewed. I looked over at the pills in the bathroom. Maybe my memory was skewed too. Maybe he was right. I didn’t think I was an inherently violent person, but how could one really know?

“Fuck Patrick. I reached out to him the other day, just like you asked. He wouldn’t meet with me,” I said.

“So this is about Patrick.” Hank stood back up and shook his head, walking into the kitchen to pour himself an iced tea. Hank hated when I talked about him. Patrick was the one who got me to sell my half of the club.

“It’s not only about Patrick. It’s about Hayden too,” I said.

“Just slow down for a second,” he said. “I’m a little confused. What bar are you talking about?”

Just breathe. “I remember the first time Hayden came here, Hank. I finally found someone I could trust. We were in love,” I said, feeling my heart thrust into my stomach. “What was I thinking? I can’t love someone. Everything I touch turns to shit.”

“Hayden will see that you’re ready to commit,” he said. “Look at this place. You’re clearing out half your shit just for him. You’re ready to commit.”

“Patrick will ruin everything,” I said. “Hayden will never move in with me. This is all wasted energy.”

Hank stared at me strangely. I had seen that look before. The man thought I was unstable. “Calm down, guy. You’re going to give me an anxiety attack,” he said. “What’s this about a bar?”

“You don’t remember three years ago?” I asked him, controlling my breath as best I could.

Hank tried his best to think about it. “A lot of bullshit happened back then, Leo. You’re going to need to elaborate if you want me to remember,” he said.

I leaned against the wall, silently going over the events of that night in my head. It was all so hazy, so unreal and devastating that I actually believed it might have only been a dream. I thought I could love Hayden without all these events resurfacing, but like all truths, they came out like daggers.

“After the breakup, I couldn’t forgive myself. I decided that I wouldn’t love again. I went out and got myself piss drunk. I drove my truck about a meter before getting it stuck against the curb. I wanted to break everything in sight, but when it came down to it, I just wanted to hurt myself.

“I remember sitting on the edge of my seat, weighing my options. I was in my late thirties. I had lived out my glory days. I had traveled the world, had relative monetary success, and I got to love somebody,” I said. “So I decided to let it all go. I was going to keep drinking until somebody found me, hopefully, dead on the side of the road.”

“I hated those times,” Hank said. “You scared everybody. You were a ticking time bomb. Everybody thought you’d explode at any second.”

“I regret it all,” I whispered. “But I’m not violent. That’s not who I am at my core.”

“Patrick was no better, guy. He held a knife to you during an argument. I saw it happen in front of my own eyes,” he said. “You were both so fucking unstable.”

“Patrick was violent with me because I could take it,” I said.

“What a line of utter bullshit,” Hank said. “You may be strong on the outside, but you’re an emotional being just like anybody else. I hated how he treated you, screaming at you like that all of the time. He has no right to say what he did to Hayden.”

“He suffered a traumatic incident,” I said. I didn’t know why I was defending Patrick all of a sudden, but he had a way of getting guys to question themselves over his behavior.

“And you didn’t?” Hank asked. “Before Patrick, you were never seen as out of control. He clouded everyone’s eyes for a while.”

“Everyone thought I was a violent lunatic,” I said. “It’s odd. At first, you think you know yourself, but when you’re partner says enough things about you to your friends, you start to believe the lies.”

“If I had known he would have done this, I would never have suggested you talk to Patrick. I’m sorry, Leo. It was a dumb idea,” he said.

“It’s not your fault. You didn’t know he would overreact like this,” I said.

The day was edging into night, and we had done a considerable amount of work, clearing out the old rubble from my last life. It was time to move on, even if things felt out of control at the moment. I had to talk to Hayden about the end of my relationship. It wasn’t going to be easy, but my life had never been easy.

“I’m going to see Hayden soon. I’ll clear it up,” I said. I hoped that I could.

Hank nodded and helped me push the boxes into the hall. All of this would be gone in the morning. If Hayden wanted to, he could move in soon, and we could start our lives.

Hank said his goodbyes, but before he left, he stopped to ask me one question. “What happened at the bar?”

I looked at him, but I didn’t give him the answer that he wanted. “I’d rather not talk about it right now.”

Hank didn’t ask anything else. He knew when to cut it off with me. I figured that he trusted me, but there was a shadow of a doubt that hung around everyone I knew. Could anybody trust me anymore? Could I even trust myself?

I drove to Hayden’s house. I even bought his mother flowers to try and clear the air between the three of us. All I wanted, more than anything in the world, was to patch things up between us.

When I got there, I sat in the dark parking lot like a coward. I went over the night in question inside my head a million times over. What I did was beyond reckless, but it wasn’t me.

Finally, I turned my car off and walked to his door. When Hayden answered, he nodded at me. “Hey,” he whispered.

“Hey.” I held up the bouquet of flowers. “For your mom,” I said.

Hayden took the bouquet and put his nose near the petals to smell their sweet aroma. “They’re beautiful,” he said. “She’s at work, but I’ll give them to her when she comes home. Come inside—I’m just finishing my dinner.”

It had been three days since we last talked, but it felt a lot longer. I walked through his vibrant kitchen, body stiff, a much too aware version of myself. “I cleared out the extra room today,” I told him.

“Oh yeah?” Hayden made his way toward his food. He grabbed the plate and ate the rest of his food. “Sorry. I’ve been feeling sick all day. This is the first time I’ve felt okay enough to eat something.”

“You’re probably pregnant,” I joked.

He finished his food. “Maybe,” he said, looking down. I quickly regretted making the tasteless joke when he didn’t laugh.

I felt like there was so much distance between us. I owed him an explanation. I let Hayden speak first.

“Look, I’ve had a couple of days to think about things. You know, about what Patrick told me,” Hayden said.

“It’s not as bad as you think,” I said.

I stopped myself from saying too much too fast. I held onto the hope that we would be able to get past all of this someday, but I had to be patient. That was something that, of course, I wasn’t good at. He looked down, finally seeing the bandages around my hand. The wound had apparently opened again, soaking the bottom of the dressing. Hayden let out a painful sigh.

“Jeez! What happened to you, baby?” He quickly covered his mouth, but I heard what he had said. Baby.

I glanced down. I had already forgotten about the simple wound I got when a fragile vase broke against my palm. The physical pain didn’t quite feel like anything when it was stacked up against everything else.

“Oh, this,” I said. “It happened earlier, but it’s not a big deal.”

“It doesn’t hurt?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said.

Tenderly, Hayden reached for my palm. I sat down on at the table, letting him examine me with sympathetic eyes. Those eyes were always so beautiful to me, so loving and never distant. They were the only set of eyes that seemed to want to lift me up, even when I didn’t necessarily deserve it.

“You’re having a rough time without me,” he said.

“You should move in with me. It’ll make things easier,” I said.

“Leo,” he whispered. “I don’t know, okay?”

“Sorry,” I said.

Don’t let this be over. Don’t give up on me. I’m not broken.

The silence in his house loomed over us. If I could just find something to say, I thought, I could keep our momentum moving. We could be together, happy and in love again.

Suddenly, I wished his mom were still here, hovering over us in that weird way she liked to do. At least then, we might have a laugh together after this was resolved.

“I just have to say one thing,” Hayden finally said. My heart raced, anxiously pounding against my chest. “I don’t think Patrick is being honest,” he said.

“You don’t?” I couldn’t believe my ears, but I absolutely heard him correctly.

“No, I don’t,” he said. “But I don’t particularly trust you either. I almost cut the ties completely, Leo. So if you want me to believe you, you should tell me what happened. You can start from the very beginning.”

I nodded, and I would soon tell him everything that happened that night. First, I wanted to give my reasoning for holding back.

“More than anything, I never wanted to bring the past into this relationship. We were always supposed to be something different,” I said.

Fucking Patrick, I thought. His love language was doing the opposite of what made me feel good. I got out of that horrid relationship, but I couldn’t seem to break that toxic connection.

“You weren’t trying to hide it from me?” Hayden retook my hand, and I answered him truthfully.

“Hayden, I would never lie to you. I just don’t want the dark cloud of my past following us. I thought you’d leave, that maybe you’d decide you wanted women again or something, so I held back. It was a mistake,” I said.

“Women? No way. That never went through my head. All I want is a good partner who loves me as much as I love them,” he said.

“The day after he had the miscarriage, I got shit wasted. I wasn’t a good partner at that moment of time. I know there aren’t any excuses, but you have to understand Patrick and I’s relationship to know why I was so distant,” I said.

“You left him alone one day after it happened. It’s a red flag,” he said.

“Days before, he was throwing punches at me. He held a knife toward me. This happened in front of Hank. You can ask him yourself. That’s just one example of many too. Patrick just wasn’t a good guy,” I said.

“He actually hit you?” he asked. Hayden’s eyes widened with surprise, but as shocking as it was to him, it was true. He did that kind of shit all of the time.

“It didn’t hurt,” I said.

“That doesn’t matter,” he whispered.

There was only one way to put it. “Three years of hell was enough for me to understand that I needed to leave him. Patrick is a toxic person, and anyone who has fallen in love with someone like that knows that they’re one aim is to give you as much trauma as they can.

“The worst decision was to stay in case we had a child together, but I felt like I had run out of options. All I wanted was to fix his problems. I didn’t have a chance to fix my own, so when it all came crashing down, I let out it all out of the bottle,” I said.

“So what happened?” he asked.

“I got drunk that night, and I mean really fucking drunk. I’m not proud of this, but I tried driving. Luckily, my truck got stuck on a parking block. I remember leaving the parking lot and drinking a full bottle of Jaeger. Next thing I knew, I was at a local dive bar, a place I knew wasn’t safe for guys like us. I remember screaming at the top of my lungs, smashing the light bulbs around the pool tables. Eventually, they knocked me into place,” I said.

“I’ve never seen you act like that,” he said.

It was embarrassing to admit what really happened. I wasn’t a violent person, but on that night, I became someone completely different. I lost myself to the self-hatred that Patrick made me feel. I just wanted to end it all.

“That night, I had a death wish. I was going to go to the bar, stir as many people up as I could, and hopefully never wake up again,” I said. “It almost worked too.”

The worst part was seeing Hayden’s face change as I told him this. I wasn’t ever going back into those depths again, but how could he know that? I was the first guy he had chosen to settle down with, but already issues were rising out of the mud.

Patrick had done precisely what I feared most. He twisted into the start of our relationship like a snake. He told half-truths, just enough to cast enough doubt into Hayden’s head.

“Did they hurt you?” he asked.

I nodded my head. “Beat the living hell out of me,” I muttered, unable to speak correctly. I hated thinking about the first blow. It freaked me out to think about how quickly I blacked out.

“I got a few punches in before the bartender knocked me in the back of my head with the end of a Billy club. He took my arms and forced them behind my back. He cuffed me to one of the sewage pipes in the bathroom. I didn’t know what they were going to do, but what scares me the most is that I accepted my own death. They kicked my teeth in. Next morning, I woke up in the hospital. Someone must have had a conscience and dropped me off,” I said.

Hayden was tender with me, but I knew it was hard for him to imagine me like that. He had seen me when I didn’t take my pills, but that was nothing like the night I decided life wasn’t worth living.

“I wasn’t a part of your life then, but it scares me. I feel like I don’t know who you are anymore,” Hayden said. “My dad is a good example of that. He was fucking angry, but he wasn’t always like that. There was a time when he thought he could manage that side of him.”

“I’m not like your father,” I said.

“I have spent my entire life trying to distance myself from that sort of behavior. I know too much about men with anger issues. As far as this goes, I desperately need to know what I’m getting into.”

“The guy I was that night wasn’t me,” I said. I let myself be broken. I allowed myself to fall. “What I am now… that’s me. That’s the version of me I want you to see for the rest of our lives.”

Hayden still looked concerned. You don’t really know how much you care for someone until things start to turn a little sour. At that moment, I felt on the brink of losing everything I ever wanted.

“There will be hard times. I just can’t be sure you won’t react that way again,” he said.

I hung my head, exhausted. Patrick had apparently won the fight. There was no way I could earn Hayden’s trust back, and even if I somehow did, it wouldn’t be the same.

The tears fell like the winter rain. There was no going back from here, but I could at least say a few last words. “There was no safe place for me until I found you,” I said.

In a moment of passion, I cradled his face gently with my palm, feeling his soft skin for the last time. I made sure to take one long look at him before kissing his cheek lightly. “I cared about you more than anything else in my life. I’ll never forget meeting you, Hayden.”

I stood up and made my way to the door. There was no use in fighting when you had a thousand daggers stabbing into your heart. I walked outside and closed the door behind me. The sun was setting, but the beautiful purple hue didn’t inspire me. I felt empty.

The front door opened quietly behind me, but why? I turned around. “I said I was sorry,” I muttered.

“I’m pregnant,” he replied, walking toward me.

I staggered forward, but reality felt very surreal. “You’re… what?” I asked, still not quite comprehending what he had just said.

“I took a test yesterday. I’m pregnant, Leo,” I said.

My world started to spin around me. “Pregnant? How in the hell… but we used a knot-proof condom!”

“Shit happens,” he murmured, looking down. “I knew this would be impossible.”

“I’m just confused,” I said.

“And I’m not? I don’t know how this happened, Leo. We went pretty crazy that night. The stupid condom must have broke when you knotted inside of me,” he said.

I nodded and took a firm step forward. “A baby…” I whispered.

Hayden wasn’t smiling, which meant that it wasn’t time to celebrate. For all I knew, he wanted to go to the clinic to get rid of it. I had been through similar pain, and I wouldn’t be able to take that kind of hurt again.

“Yep. We don’t have to keep it. Don’t worry,” he said.

I wanted to hold him, but all I could do was look at him as if this were the end. “Please don’t do anything rash,” I said. “I can help you raise our baby. Even if you don’t want me, at least let me be there. Don’t cut me out.”

Hayden was the first guy I ever pleaded to. That was something new. Hayden could see it in my eyes. The distress. The obsessive need to be close to him. He had to see it. Right?

“I do want you. I’m just worried I made the wrong choice,” he said.

My body eased up, and I took him in my arms. “I will prove it to you. You didn’t make the wrong choice. I’ve been ready for a change for a long time, and I’ve never met someone who has pulled me in so much,” I said.

I hadn’t said those words in a long time. I love you. I felt the burning, yearning love inside of my heart, pumping that warm feeling throughout my body.

“You’re my favorite person,” I said. “Hayden, I fucking love you.”

He raised his gaze to meet mine. Strength resolved inside our hearts. These days had changed us, but they wouldn’t destroy our vision of our future. “You said it. You finally said it,” he said.

“I’ve felt it for a long time. I don’t take those words lightly,” I said.

Hayden’s chin fell against my chest. He kissed over my shirt, pulling against the thread line at the bottom. “You’ll be there for me?”

“I will,” I said. “I won’t let you down, Hayden.”

A reluctant smile formed on his face. “It’s not going to be easy,” he said.

“Fuck easy. I’m the beast,” I said.

Hayden laughed and squeezed around my chest. The fear eased away from me. I wrapped my arms around Hayden and held him tight.

“Everything is going to be okay,” I murmured softly. “We’re going to do this right. I’ll never let you down.”