Page 86 of Forced Into Your Arms
Mace and Sam?
My first reaction was disbelief. I’d known both of them for years, spent more hours with them than most people spent with their own families, and never saw a damn thing. No looks. No touches. Nothing that would’ve made me wonder whether they were anything more than close friends.
That was probably the point.
They’d hidden it from everybody, including me.
I picked the phone back up and kept reading, even though part of me felt like I’d already seen enough.
The messages went back more than a year. Most were still normal, but now that I understood what was underneath them, the conversations sounded different. Mace checking whether Sam had eaten. Sam asking when he was coming over. Arguments that made no sense when I thought they were only friends. Apologies. Plans. Private jokes I’d probably heard in person without knowing where they came from.
Then there were the messages that left no room for doubt.
Sam:I love you. Even when you get on my fucking nerves.
Mace had waited almost ten minutes before responding.
Mace:Love you too.
I lowered the phone to the desk.
Everything about Mace since Sam died suddenly made sense. The bloodshot eyes. The way he stood beside Sam’s grave after everybody else left. The way he’d fought to hold himself together during the funeral. The question about the phone.
He hadn’t been worried I would find proof that he helped kill Sam. He’d been worried I would find this.
I wasn’t disgusted.
That wasn’t what had me sitting here feeling like the floor had shifted beneath me. They were grown men, and who theyloved wasn’t my business. What bothered me was that they’d believed they had to hide it from me.
Sam had been my cousin. Mace was the one person outside my family I trusted with everything. They’d been together for more than a year, maybe longer, and neither one of them had said a damn word.
I reached for my phone and called Mace.
He answered after the third ring. “What’s up?”
“Where you at?”
“Handling that number you sent me.”
“Come to the restaurant.”
There was a pause before he asked, “You need something?”
“I wouldn’t have called if I didn’t.”
“I’m about twenty minutes out.”
“Make it ten…”
I ended the call before he could answer.
The next ten minutes gave me too much time to think. I opened Sam’s thread again, trying to understand how I’d missed an entire relationship happening right in front of me. There had been late nights when Mace said he was going home, and Sam disappeared not long after. Trips they’d both skipped. Sundays when one of them showed up at my aunt’s house looking tired while the other arrived smiling for no apparent reason.
The signs had probably always been there.
I simply hadn’t been looking.
A knock was heard on my office door before Mace stepped inside. He closed it behind him and looked from me to Sam’s phone sitting on the desk.
