Chapter 180 Now matters more

Chapter 180 Now matters more
I slide into the passenger seat, the leather quiet as I settle in. Beside me, Bastian pulls the driver's door shut, sealing us inside the hushed interior of the car. Neither of us speaks for a beat. He reaches into his coat pocket, pulls out a pill bottle, pops a single pill into his mouth and swallows it dry. He reaches up with one hand, loosening his necktie just a fraction, taking a slow, deep breath.
Determined to cut through the suffocating tension before my own anxiety takes over, I clear my throat. "I got you something."
Bastian pauses, his hand dropping from his tie to glance over at me, an inquisitive brow arching.
I reach into the inner breast pocket of my leather jacket and pull out a sleek, slim navy box, complete with his name embossed across the lid in delicate, elegant gold script. I extend it toward him.
He looks from my face down to the box, his expression softening as he takes it from my hands. "What is this?"
"Open it."
He unclasps the small latch carefully, his movements surprisingly gentle. Inside, resting on a bed of dark velvet, is a custom-crafted fountain pen. It’s allegedly forged from polished matte-black titanium with intricate, gold-leaf filigree swirling along the barrel. His initials are engraved subtly near the clip.
"I saw this company online that custom-makes them," I explain, suddenly feeling a little self-conscious as I watch him lift it out of the box. "It made me think of you. I ordered it a while ago."
Bastian holds the weight of the pen in his palm, his thumb slowly tracing over the cold, raised metal of the engraving. He inspects it with an intensity so quiet I can barely hear him breathing.
Watching him stare at it, a spike of insecurity hits me. Now that it’s actually in his hands, I can’t help but wonder if it’s a silly, ridiculous gift, especially for a man who buys multi-million-dollar clubs on a casual weekday.
I scratch the back of my neck, shifting uncomfortably in my seat. "I mean... they had a few other designs on the site. If you want to switch it out for something different, or if it’s not really your thing, we could—"
He turns his head, his blue eyes locking onto mine. He doesn't say a word for several seconds, but the weight of his stare makes those few seconds feel like an eternity.
"Do you like it?" I ask, my voice dropping. "You can be honest."
Instead of answering, he reaches out with his free hand and grips the back of my neck. His fingers dig firmly into my hair at the nape, holding me right where I am. A solid grip that grounds me instantly.
"You and I," he says, his voice a rough rumble. He leans in closer, his eyes searching mine with a fierce, desperate urgency. "We're solid? No matter what happens... disagreements, fights, secrets, nothing's going to break this. Right?"
I blink, thrown off by the sudden intensity radiating off him, but I don't hesitate. "Of course," I say softly.
"No matter what?" he repeats, his thumb pressing hard against my jawline.
I bring my hand up, wrapping my fingers around his wrist. "No matter what."
There’s a flickering shadow in his eyes....something painfully close to fear, an emotion that looks completely foreign and misplaced on a man like him. It sends a sharp pang through my chest.
"Hey," I remind him gently, squeezing his wrist. "You told me about the car accident, and it changed nothing between us. Whatever else you have to say, it’s going to stay that way."
He holds my gaze, silently gauging the truth in my words. Whatever he sees in my face must finally satisfy him, because the tension in his shoulders visibly breaks. He leans across the console and presses his lips to mine in a deep, lingering kiss.
"I love the pen," he murmurs softly against my lips, his breath warm on my skin. "Genuinely, Kaden. I’ll treasure it forever."
A genuine smile breaks across my face. "I'm glad."
His jaw works as he tries to figure out how to navigate the massive leap he’s about to take. Instead of cornering him with a specific question or interrogating him, I decide to make it easier for him.
"Just talk to me," I say softly, keeping my tone warm. "What's on your mind? What's eating at you?"
There's a fragile, paper-thin atmosphere woven into the air between us. A quiet so dense that a single loud breath feels like it could shatter it completely. Bastian never lets go of me. His hand remains locked around the back of my neck, his thumb resting just beneath my ear. If anything, his fingers have only grown tighter, little by little, as though some part of him is afraid I'll disappear if he stops holding on.
He stares straight ahead through the dark windshield for a long, agonizing moment before his chest expands with a deep, shaky breath.
I don't move, I barely breathe. For a long time, he says nothing. Then, finally, he speaks.
"He and my father were close friends," he says, his voice dropping into a flat, hollow tone. A complete absence of emotion that makes my stomach instantly drop. "They met when they were twelve years old. Some elite private boarding school in New England. They were inseparable back then. Same friends. Same parties. Same everything."
I stay perfectly still, holding my breath, my hand resting on his knee.
"He was always around," he continues, his thumb making a slow, absentminded pass against my hair. "He attended every birthday, every holiday dinner, every major milestone. When my father was away on business, he was the one my mother called if something went wrong. He was family. An uncle, for all practical purposes."
He pauses, his jaw clenching hard enough that I can see the muscle flex in his cheek. He closes his eyes for a second, then opens them, staring blankly into the dark. A cold, sickening dread begins to pool at the bottom of my stomach. My pulse starts to hammer in my ears, but I force myself to stay quiet.
"I was young. He'd been around for years. So when he started paying more attention to me..." He pauses, his fingers tighten. "It didn't seem like anything. He'd find reasons to be alone with me. Stay behind after everyone else had left. Tell me things he said were private. Things that made me feel..." He stops, searching for the word.
"Special, maybe."
He gives a humorless little breath.
"I thought that's what it was. Then suddenly there were rules....small ones at first. Things I wasn't supposed to tell my parents. Things that were ‘just between us.’"
His voice gets flatter with every sentence, as though he's carefully sanding all the emotion off the words before they can reach me. "I guess when you're that age, you don't understand what exactly someone's doing if they've spent years carefully teaching you to trust them first."
My throat tightens. I look down at his hand holding the pen. He's trembling, barely, but he is. I want to say something, I don't know what. I'm not sure there is anything. Because I'd already drawn this conclusion.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I'd put the pieces together.
I'd known. Or I'd suspected enough.
But I'd never let myself dwell on it. Because acknowledging it meant opening an entirely different door. One I knew we'd eventually have to walk through head-on. And Bastian had made it very clear he had no intention of ever opening that door.
"He always..." His voice catches and he stops. For a moment, I think that's it. Then he exhales through his nose. "He liked making it seem like I was choosing it." His mouth twists. "And when I didn't understand what was happening, he'd tell me I was being difficult. Ungrateful."
His grip tightens around my neck.
"But eventually, I couldn't do it anymore "
The silence that follows is unbearable. His eyes finally meet mine. There's no panic in them, just exhaustion. A kind of ancient exhaustion that makes him look nothing like the man who walks into rooms and owns them without saying a word.
"I did the recovery thing," he suddenly says. "The therapy. The talking. The digging through every ugly little piece of it." His expression barely changes. "I'm not in denial, Kaden. I don't refuse to talk about it because I haven't processed it. I've fucking processed it."
There's something almost bitter in the way he says it.
"How could I not? If anything, I processed it too much." His thumb moves once against my neck. "I know what happened. I know what it did to me. I know what parts of me came from it and what parts didn't." He takes another slow breath. "I know I'm angry. I know I should've been protected. I know none of it was my fault."
He pauses....then, quieter, "I know all of it."
His voice breaks slightly and he clears his throat. “I'd just rather leave it there. I don't want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder at something that happened over a decade ago. I want what's happening now." His gaze drops briefly to my lips before returning to my eyes. "You. This. Now matters more to me."
I watch him for a while after that.
I don't believe him.
Not because I think he's lying to me, but because I think he's lying to himself. Bastian says he wants now, but I can see it in the way his eyes have gone distant, in the tension that never quite leaves his shoulders, in the hand still curled around the back of my neck like he's holding on to something that happened years ago.
He isn't entirely here, maybe he never has been.
There's a part of him still trapped back there, in some room and some year I can't see. A vital piece of him that never got out, no matter how much therapy he went through or how many times he convinced himself he'd processed it. And the worst part is that he just told me he doesn't want to make peace with it. He doesn't want to heal from it. He wants to put it behind him and never look back.
But I don't think you can leave something behind when it's still living inside you. Maybe that's the difference between not being in denial and actually being healed. Bastian knows what happened, he knows what it did to him, but knowing isn't the same as being free of it. And whatever this is between us, whatever we're trying so desperately to build, can't survive if part of him is always somewhere else.
I don't say any of that though, I don't even know if I'm allowed to. So instead, I move closer. And I tuck my head into the curve of his neck, breathing him in. He goes still, then his chin lowers gently against my hair. His hand remains at the back of my neck, and neither of us says anything.