“Why did you do it?” Henry's voice shocks him, fracturing that silence with its sharp edge. Alex already knows, but he still asks, “Do what?”  “Kiss me.”  To sell the bit gets caught behind Alex's teeth, the words too heavy on his tongue to slip past his lips. His instinct is to deflect, to toss his vulnerable heart into a locked box inside his already cracked open chest. It's a defense mechanism, a desperate desire to protect himself from giving too much away, from admitting that he's fallen in love with his best friend so irreversibly that he'll never recover from a rejection.