out into a grin and his arms widening to his sides when he saw me. “Welcome home, brother. When did you get in?”
“Yesterday.” I tightened the bolt I was busy with, feeling his gaze heavy on my back. “I don’t want to talk about it. How’re Shira and the baby?”
“Doing well. We’re counting down the days until the little princess arrives.” He walked around me and leaned against the engine I was working on, concern furrowing his brow as he folded his arms loosely over his chest. “What exactly don’t you want to talk about? Fiji, or your fake marriage while you were there?”
“Both.” They were so rolled up in each other that there was no telling how to speak about one without the other. “All that I’m willing to say is that I wished it had ended differently.”
“How did it end?”
I scowled at the metal under my hands, even though it was completely innocent in all this. “With me leaving in the pre-dawn hours without saying goodbye.”
Kavan made a strangled noise at the back of his throat, his brows shooting up. “Seriously? You of all people sneaked away under the cover of darkness? What the fuck?”
“I didn’t sneak away.” I scoffed, giving him a narrow-eyed glare. “She said she didn’t want to say goodbye to me in the morning, so I didn’t make her say goodbye. I caught the first flight out and here I am.”
He covered his face with his hands, groaning and shaking his head. “Dude, I don’t know this woman, but I doubt she meant that as literally as you took it.”
“What?” I snapped. None of this was Kavan’s fault either, but I was in a shitty mood, and he was pushing for information I’d already told him I didn’t want to give.
“If she said she didn’t want to say goodbye to you, it meant she didn’t want your time together to end. Not that she literally didn’t want to do the goodbye part.”
“You know what? You’re right.” I turned my glare on the engine again. “You don’t know her.”
My friend, who was obviously in the mood to get a fist to his jaw because he kept pushing, let out an exasperated sigh. “Maybe not, but I know women and I know relationships. I’ve only been with Shira for over a decade. What was your longest relationship again?”
“You and Shira were meant to fucking be. You never went through anything like this.”
Blue eyes turning to ice, his jaw tightened and his fingers curled into a fist on the engine. “Your memory seems to be failing you in your old age. Maybe we didn’t meet in a tropical fucking paradise and our biggest obstacle wasn’t how to tell each other that we wanted to keep seeing each other. You know what our obstacles were? Continuous deployments for the first few years we were together, my injury, her not knowing whether I was alive, my rehab, depression when I got discharged, trying to build a new life for ourselves, fertility issues and treatments. The list goes on and fucking on, but why don’t you tell me again that I don’t know what I’m talking about because we never went through anything like that?”
My anger and frustration deflated like he’d popped the ever-growing balloon with a pin. I shoved my hands into my hair and looked up at him properly, letting out a sigh as I tilted my head toward the ceiling.
“Fuck. I’m sorry. Sometimes I forget all that shit, but when you summarize it all like that, you two really have been through a lot.”
He nodded, clenching and unclenching his fingers and rolling his neck. Then he let out a deep breath of his own. “Let’s go get some coffee and you can actually talk to me without pretending like you’re the only person in the world to ever have had problems with a woman.”
“Still don’t want to talk about it.” But I was already placing my tools back in their container and following him to the break room.
He turned his head to the side to look at me over his shoulder, making sure I could see his exaggerated eye roll. “Do you know how many times I’ve said those exact same words to you? You kept coming at me anyway, and it helped. I’m returning the favor.”
“Would you like to braid my hair while we’re at it?” I smirked, knowing I was being an asshole but really wishing he’d leave me the fuck alone about this.
He flipped