With a helpless, exasperated little moan, he pulled me out of my chair and onto his lap. He started stroking my hair, his mouth at my cheekbone, lips tracing the tears, and murmuring, "Oh, angel," over and over.
After some time I found my composure again, and we went back to acting like things were normal and okay, because we were both starving enough to eat that lie.
"I know why you love to act," Dante told me. He was distracting me from heavy with light.
"I crave the escape. I long for it."
He nodded. He had known. "Who do you want to be right now?"
"Right now? Myself." It was sad how floored I was by that. And a little exasperating how every subject seemed to be an emotional landmine if you spent any time at all treading over it.
I had more questions for him, of course I did, but I had no urge to ask them. More truths could come later. I needed to keep some of my fiction for a time.
There's only so much a heart can take.
Also, the deeper I delved with him, the more inevitable it would be that he began to do some delving of his own, and I did not want that. It went beyond want. I could not take it.
"You have to find a cover story for where you're at when you're with me," he told me later that night.
That was easy. "Anton will be my cover."
I watched as his face went stiff, something dreadful and cruel crawling across it.
Jealousy, of course.
I watched his lips purse. I swear the more mean his mouth twisted the handsomer he was. It was out of hand. I squirmed in my seat.
"Not him," he said, tone hard. "You'll break it off with him, of course. I don't want you to stay tied to him for any reason, not even as an excuse."
"There was nothing going on between me and Anton. Never has been." I saw his face. "I was messing with you. Again." I caught his expression. "I don't know how you can be surprised. I'm not going to say it's your fault that I did it, but you made it too easy. Irresistible for me. And do you have any clue how angry I was?"
"That hurt," he said simply.
"Yes, it did," I agreed, just as simply. "And Anton's perfect as a cover, if I need one. No one ever wants to believe that we really are just friends."
His mouth twisted bitterly. "That's understandable. You are a very convincing couple.
"I told you, we are strictly friends."
"You think that doesn't make me jealous, too? I see how close you are."
"Would you rather I not have had anybody when I didn't have you? Did you want me to be alone?"
I saw I'd gone too far, as I tended to. I corrected the behavior with a quick and necessary subject change. "What do I need the cover for, anyway? Is your mother having me followed?"
"Worse and better."
I cocked my head to the side. "How so?"
"You've been living with one of her spies."
"Excuse me?" I asked him slowly, carefully, as though the way it came out might affect the answer.
"My mother has had someone close to you for quite some time. She knows things that only one of your roommates could know. So we have to be very careful. All of your living habits are being reported to her. That's why you still have to stay there some nights. Why you have to have a cover for the nights that you spend with me. It could be worse. At least they're all gone half the week with work."
It could be worse? I gave him a look of accusing bafflement. "One of my closest friends has been betraying me to your mother?"
He sucked in a breath, punched it out, and said, "Yes, I'm afraid so. Any clue which one it might be?"
I shook my head. I only knew one thing. No matter which one it was, if he was right, it would hurt like hell when I figured it out.
And in the meantime, there was the hurt of doubting three women who had each come to mean the world to me in their own ways.
Farrah, who made me laugh every day, rain or shine. Demi, who made my heart lighter and less cynical. Or Leona, who had taught me what it meant to have girlfriends, to need them, to know the power of being supported by other women.
It was only after a while that I realized Dante and I had been staring at each other. His expression mirrored mine exactly, a moment of perfect understanding, that I'd only ever had with him, where I realized that we were taking the same information and doing the same pragmatic thing with it, processing it identically.
His mouth twisted up bitterly, but his eyes were affectionate on me, and I realized he'd just come to the same conclusion.
It was just another thing I'd made myself forget: The way we dissected life, with a razor-sharp cynicism that held just the perfect amount of shining optimism peppered in. Who else could ever love that about me the way he did?
What was a partner, if not someone who made you feel less alone in the universe? Someone who validated your existence just by understanding you completely and loving you anyway?
Jesus, I was in trouble.
"Just be careful," he finally said. "You can't let any of them know that you suspect them. You have to behave as if each one is the culprit."