Chapter 13

Armed at last with a proper excuse to approach Rhys, Dante stepped into the departure area with a stride far more energetic than when he had first arrived at the airport. His pretty lover—no, his ex-lover, though the odds of shedding that “ex” title were suddenly skyrocketing—had already vanished into the crowd, likely because his legs were so long.

Dante pushed aggressively through security and departure screening. Ordinarily, he would have cracked a flirtatious joke at the TSA officer who gave him a playful wink, but right now, he was a man on a mission. Moving through the checkpoints at a breakneck pace, he walked straight toward the lounge the attendant had mentioned. There was still plenty of time before the flight, and the Rhys he knew loathed crowded places. He was bound to be hiding away in the lounge rather than wandering the duty-free shops.

Dante stepped through the entrance of the lounge and scanned the room. Because Rhys possessed the kind of striking beauty that commanded attention anywhere, Dante assumed he would spot him immediately. But to his dismay, the room yielded nothing. Growing increasingly anxious, Dante peered around various corners of the lounge, making awkward eye contact with entirely innocent strangers, before finally giving up and choosing a seat to wait.

Thirty minutes bled by, and Rhys still hadn’t appeared. Had he been wrong to assume Rhys would automatically seek out the lounge? The fierce confidence that he knew Rhys inside and out after all their years together suddenly felt incredibly laughable. Deflated, Dante sank deep into the cushions of the sofa, his body going completely limp. His fingers tapped a restless rhythm against his thigh—tap, tap, tap—as he forced himself to take deep breaths to calm his fraying nerves.

Don’t get impatient, he scolded himself. Even if you don’t see him here, you’ll see him on the plane. You saw him checking in earlier. Every open counter at that time was bound for Rome.

After successfully reassuring himself that their paths would cross, Dante began to map out what he would actually say. He had been so consumed by the frantic chase to catch up to him that he hadn’t properly formulated an opening line. What kind of apology would it take to earn Rhys’s forgiveness?

But perhaps because it had been so long since they last shared a peaceful moment, he couldn’t quite picture Rhys softening and welcoming him back. Rhys’s frigid demeanor at the café had been deeply shocking, and the two months of radio silence weighed heavily on Dante’s mind.

…Being on the same plane as me really is a reconciliation signal, right?

Rhys’s sheer presence on this flight certainly implied he still harbored lingering feelings, but when Dante replayed the agonizing vacuum of the last two months, his confidence began to wobble. The toxic loop that had sparked Dante’s twenty-first breakup notice in the first place had been Rhys’s chronically confusing behavior, and the time apart had only allowed dark thoughts to fester.

More and more, Dante had begun to fear a heartbreaking truth: Rhys had never been in this relationship with the same intensity of heart.

Dante refused to believe the bitter rumors Lucy and Lazzaro had thrown around at the bar—that Rhys was seeing someone else. Yet, no matter how he spun it, Rhys’s past behavior looked damningly like that of a man who desperately wanted to hide his partner.

After their very first major fight, Rhys had promised to introduce him to the people in his life. But the only person Dante had ever met was Rhys’s mother. He had never been granted an introduction to Rhys’s childhood friends, his college classmates, or his professional acquaintances in the art world.

Whenever pressed, Rhys had simply explained away the isolation by saying he was genuinely unsociable, that he preferred his own company, and that his mother was the only meaningful relationship Dante ever needed to worry about.

But Dante couldn’t bring himself to believe it anymore.

To Dante, it looked as though Rhys wanted to keep their respective worlds rigidly separated by an impenetrable wall. Dante had proudly shown Rhys photos of his own tight-knit friends, detailing every childhood story, but Rhys had never expressed a desire to join them or even asked a single follow-up question. Even when Dante explicitly suggested they all grab drinks together, Rhys would gently decline, claiming he didn’t want to intrude on Dante’s quality time with his friends. And because of that artificial boundary, Dante was entirely barred from accompanying Rhys on his personal outings.

It wasn’t that Dante demanded they share absolutely every waking breath. He just… wanted there to be a little overlap.

From the prestigious circumstances of their births to the daily radius of their lives, not a single element of Dante and Rhys naturally intersected. Their temperaments were night and day; their hobbies shared no common ground. If there could be just one overlapping fragment of their existences, Dante felt it would finally anchor them together.

That was exactly why, when Rhys unexpectedly suggested they move in together, Dante believed he was finally being invited inside the fortress walls.

But it had been a cruel illusion. Even after the proposal, Rhys maintained his rigid stance, insisting he still required absolute solitude and refusing to share the address of his personal art studio. If that was the case, then the only thing changing was the roof over their heads. Moving in together was supposed to mean synthesizing your lives. If nothing was going to change, why had Rhys suggested it at all?

While Dante was trapped in this agonizing psychological vertigo, swinging between heaven and hell every ten minutes, the heavy doors of the lounge swung open. The fragmented, distracted gazes of the modern travelers in the room—each buried in their own devices—unanimously pulled away from their screens and snapped toward the entrance.

The moment Dante witnessed that collective shift in the room’s gravity, he knew.

It was Rhys.

Dante whipped his head around, and sure enough, there he was. An angel descended to earth.

He possessed blond hair that looked meticulously spun from pure sunlight, and gray-blue eyes perpetually soaked in a profound, arresting melancholy. The mere sight of that breathtaking face sent Dante’s heart hammering violently against his ribs. He instantly forgot the erratic mood swings that had tortured him just moments before; a swelling, dizzying wave of excitement flooded his entire being.

At the café, he had lacked the courage. Today would be different. The phantom image of seat number 5A flashed through his mind, solidifying his resolve. Dante shot to his feet and strode with purpose toward Rhys, completely ignoring the quiet murmurs of admiration trailing in his ex’s wake.

Facing him clearly in the bright light of day, Rhys looked devastatingly youthful. With nothing but a light backpack slung casually over one shoulder, dressed in a distressed brown leather jacket, a gray sweatshirt, simple jeans, and pristine white sneakers, he could easily pass for a college student. The bitter realization struck Dante all over again: he had brutally kicked away his own good fortune. To think he had pushed away a man that young, that gorgeous, and that gentle with his own two hands.

Perhaps sensing the heavy, determined weight of Dante’s approach, Rhys abruptly stopped in his tracks. Facing the lover he hadn’t properly looked at in months, Dante offered a wide smile brimming with raw joy.

“Hi, Rhys!”

Subconsciously, Dante fully expected Rhys to mirror the warmth. Throughout their four years, whenever Dante smiled, Rhys had always bloomed in response. But instead of that familiar radiance, Rhys stared back at him as if he were looking at an incredibly tedious chore. Then, with a cynical, biting expression so wildly foreign that Dante could scarcely process it, he spoke a single word.

“What?”

The voice was ice, completely devoid of heat or emotion. Dante froze, utterly paralyzed by the unfamiliar sight. This wasn’t just the distant, sharp behavior from the café; this was a chilling, borderline hostile wall.

The catalog of speeches and apologies Dante had painstakingly prepared evaporated into thin air, leaving his mind an absolute blank. Had he misheard? He must have. There was no earthly way Rhys would ever use that tone with him.

“If you don’t need anything, move,” Rhys commanded, his voice slicing through the silence. “You’re blocking my way.”

Without granting Dante a single syllable to reply, Rhys stepped sideways, executing a sharp pivot around him as if avoiding a foul stain on the floor, and swept past. Stung to the quick by that merciless dismissal, Dante scrambled to keep pace beside him.

“That’s the first thing you say when you see me?” Dante asked, his voice tight.

“Was there supposed to be something else?”

Dante’s eyes widened in sheer shock at the cynical retort. This time, Rhys hadn’t even used polite formalities. It was a jarring, stark departure from the linguistic respect they had maintained for four years.

When they had crossed paths at the café, Dante had chalked it up to Rhys being understandably guarded, but the creature walking beside him now felt like an entirely different entity. The soft-spoken, unfailingly polite man had vanished, replaced by a volatile, razor-sharp stranger.

Not even when Dante had been dispatched to blood-soaked crime scenes as an EMT, nor when he had plunged headfirst into dark waters littered with the flaming wreckage of an exploded vessel, had his heart ever dropped with the sickening force it did now. Knowing only the version of Rhys that smiled sweetly, Dante was so profoundly rattled that his feet stopped moving entirely. His golden-brown eyes trembled.

Rhys spared a fleeting, cold glance back at Dante’s paralyzed form, then turned on his heel and continued walking without a backward glance, showing zero trace of lingering attachment. He made a beeline for the most isolated corner of the lounge, quietly setting down a designer shopping bag and his backpack.

A shopping bag.

Dante blinked slowly, analyzing the sight. He had always believed Rhys possessed absolutely zero interest in casual shopping, yet he had clearly delayed entering the lounge because he was busy purchasing something. It was becoming agonizingly clear that every single assumption he held about Rhys was fundamentally flawed. He had genuinely believed that four years of intimacy granted him an innate understanding of the man, but since the split, not a single puzzle piece fit.

Other travelers brushed past Dante as he stood frozen in the aisle. Rhys’s biting remark about him blocking the path echoed in his ears, and half-dazed, Dante slowly retreated to his seat. Those frigid eyes kept looping through his mind on a cruel reel. The man he had starved to see was sitting mere yards away, yet he couldn’t even orchestrate a basic conversation.

…You didn’t have to look that disgusted.

Only now, in the safety of his own mind, did the retorts he should have said begin to surface. He had foolishly assumed Rhys would be at least a little happy to see him, or that he would subtly betray some hidden pocket of longing. After all, hadn’t Rhys shown up for their anniversary trip? Dante had trusted that the shared date was a silent invitation to mend fences.

His chest throbbed with a dull ache at the memory of being treated like an annoying insect. The fierce courage that seat 5A had poured into his veins began to waver dangerously. Dante stared blankly at the ticket in his hand, sinking into a heavy, silent stupor for several minutes.

But as his eyes traced the printed ink, a stubborn, fiery defiance began to take root in his gut. If Rhys truly loathed him to the point of disgust, why hadn’t he canceled the entire trip in the first place? Even if, by some massive stretch of the imagination, an emergency required his presence in Rome, common sense dictated he should have altered the dates to avoid their anniversary or booked a completely different airline. More than anything, why on earth had he left Dante’s ticket untouched?

Fine. Dante needed to hear a definitive, logical explanation straight from that beautiful, infuriating mouth.

His pulse fluttered nervously at the prospect of confronting that razor-sharp version of Rhys again, but Dante steeled his resolve and stood up. Snatching his passport and suitcase from the table, he mapped out Rhys’s location. The artist was currently immersed in a book, radiating an elegant, untouchable composure. Dante marched straight toward him.

As Dante descended upon his space with a heavy, unyielding stride, Rhys noticed the sudden shadow eclipsing his light and pulled his gaze from the pages. The instant his eyes registered Dante’s face, his porcelain brow furrowed in deep irritation. It stung, but Dante forced himself to spin it positively: a beauty was beautiful even when furious. He would simply catalog this rare, irritated expression in the mental archives of his mind.

“Excuse me for a moment,” Dante said.

Before Rhys could utter a rejection, Dante swiftly nudged Rhys’s backpack and shopping bag to the side and dropped into the empty seat right next to him. Rhys’s expression darkened instantly.

“Go away.”

“Don’t we have things to talk about?” Dante pleaded, his tone desperate. “This is the first time in two months we’re properly seeing each other face-to-face. You haven’t given me a single chance to speak since the fight. Please, Rhys. Just give me five minutes. I’m begging you.”

“I told you to go,” Rhys repeated, his voice dropping into a dangerously low register.