Page 100 of Try Line Hearts
For a second he was genuinely certain he’d misheard her, that his brain had filled in something cruel and impossible because it was already primed for pain.
His back was still to her. His heartbeat felt loud enough to echo off the glass.
Slowly—moving like too much speed might shatter the moment—he turned.
Evelyn took a drag from the cigarette and exhaled into the wind, smoke unraveling harmlessly over the river. Her voice stayed calm, steady, almost conversational.
“I’m not saying that to be dramatic,” she added. “And I’m not asking you to reassure me. I just… think you deserve to hear it.”
Eli stared at her.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said finally, but the words were weak even to his own ears.
She tilted her head slightly. “Oh, but I do.”
“No one—” He stopped, swallowed. “No one knows.”
“I know,” she said gently. “Most people either don’t see it, or they see it and decide it’s something easier to explain.”
She flicked ash away with a small, precise movement. Deliberate. Controlled.
“Body language is its own language,” she went on. “Some people are fluent. Most people prefer subtitles.”
A laugh slipped out of Eli before he could stop it—short, rough, edged with disbelief.
“You’ve spoken to me for, what,” he said, “ten seconds?”
“Long enough,” she replied.
The city hummed around them. Traffic murmured. Somewhere nearby, glass clinked. The Eiffel Tower glowed on, indifferent and magnificent and completely uninterested in their small, private fracture.
Eli looked back out at the river, jaw tight, eyes stinging.
He didn’t trust anger. Didn’t know where to put it.
So he chose honesty instead—dangerous, but clean.
“This is my first time in Paris,” he said, voice tipping into something wry and fragile all at once. “The city of romance.”
He huffed out a breath that almost passed for a laugh.
“And I’m standing outside feeling sorry for myself with a woman everyone thinks is sleeping with the man I—”
The word caught.
Not because it was dramatic.
Because it was true.
“…the man I love.”
Silence fell between them, heavy and absolute.
Eli went still the second it left his mouth.
The weight of it hit him all at once—not the jealousy, not the situation, but the fact of the thing itself. He had never said it before. Not in his head, not in the dark, not as a joke or a half-thought. Never given it air.
Love.
