Page 31 of Try Line Hearts
He swallowed hard.
“You’ve figured it out,” he said, barely above a whisper.
Kaine didn’t look away. Didn’t soften his expression into something falsely gentle. He just watched Byrne the way he watched the pitch—patient, exacting, present.
“I figured out,” Kaine said slowly, “that if a joke about us being a couple sends you into a spiral, there’s more going on than media training.” A beat. “That’s all I need to know.”
He didn’t say the word.
Byrne didn’t either.
That was the mercy of it.
That was the terror.
Because once named, things could be handled. Filed. Managed. But this—this lived in the in-between. In implication. In shared silence. In awethat asked nothing and promised nothing and still felt like standing too close to the edge of something vast.
Kaine finally glanced away, deliberately, giving Byrne a sliver of privacy inside his own unraveling. A gift. A kindness.
“You don’t owe me anything,” he said quietly. “Not a story. Not a label. Not a confession.”
Something sharp rose behind Byrne’s eyes, sudden and humiliating. He blinked hard, jaw tightening, furious with himself for being this close to undone over so little. Over a word. Over the simple fact of being seen without being cornered.
“I’m pathetic,” he muttered.
Kaine snorted softly. “You’re under a microscope,” he corrected. “And human. Allegedly.”
A sound tore its way out of Byrne’s chest—ragged, unguarded. Almost a laugh. Almost a sob. He turned his face away into his sleeve, feigning a cough to cover it.
Beside him, Kaine shifted slightly, settling back into stillness, as if nothing extraordinary had just happened at all.
But the word stayed.
We.
Quiet. Dangerous.
Waiting.
Kaine shifted, hands in his pockets again. “One more thing.”
Byrne’s stomach tightened. “What.”
Kaine dug into his jacket. “This is gonna sound ridiculous, but—” He held out a small chocolate bar, wrapper purple even in the greylight, the corners softened like it had lived in a pocket. “Sugar can help after adrenaline. My nan swore by it.”
Byrne stared at it, stunned by the tenderness of the gesture.
“I don’t—”
“You don’t have to eat it,” Kaine said, voice gentle. “Just… have it.”
Byrne’s fingers closed around it before he could stop himself.
It was warm from Kaine’s body.
That warmth went straight through him.
They didn’t go back inside the café.
