“I fucking tried so hard to for so long.”
Cassie smiles, but her eyes are glossy at the edges, a detail she would deny under oath. “You loved him angry. You loved him broken, even when he was gone and you had every reason to stop. That is not the part you need to prove to anyone, Sky.” She tilts her head. “So why are you still holding back?”
I stare at her. “Are you serious right now?”
“Completely.”
“Because he broke me, Cassie.”
“I know.”
“Because I’m uncertain if love is enough this time,” I say. “I was eighteen, already broken and angry. Already so used to people leaving that some part of me had built the exit into the blueprint of what we were from the beginning. But it still hurt like hell when it happened.”
My throat tightens around the next part. “But now I have built something. Out of all that shit, all those houses, and everything that tried to make me nothing, I built a life. And if I let Zane back in and he destroys me again, I don’t know if I will recognize what is left of me the next time.”
Cassie falls quiet for a moment. Then she reaches out and presses a single finger directly onto the mark on my neck.
“Ow.”
“Sorry.” She does not look sorry. “Just checking if you were listening to yourself.”
She tilts her head. “You would rather hurt now and miss out, pre-empting something that might not even happen.”
I glare at her through tears. “You’re a menace.”
“Yes,” she agrees pleasantly. “But I am also right.”
She leans back into the cushions with the self-satisfied ease of someone who knows it and has no intention of pretending otherwise. “You are not holding back because you don’t love him. You are holding back because you do. And that is a very annoying thing you do, Sky. You wait for things to break before taking what you desperately want.”
I let out a shaky breath that does nothing to ease the tightness in my chest.
“There is something else,” I say.
Cassie’s eyes narrow immediately. The full-attention stare.
I pick at the hem of my shirt, unsure how to say it.
Her gaze drops to my hands before immediately returning to my face.
“Skylar.”
I close my eyes. “We had sex without a condom.”
Silence.
The specific silence of a woman whose brain has been handed information it was not prepared for.
I open one eye.
Cassie is staring at me. Her mouth opens, closes, then opens again. She blinks once, slowly, as if a computer rebooting after an unexpected shutdown.
“Okay,” she says at last. “I need a moment because my brain just threw itself down a full flight of stairs and is lying at the bottom, deciding whether to get up.”
“Cassie.”
“No, no. I’m fine. This is fine. We are modern women. We understand bodies, biology, and consequences. We also understand that Zane Rivera without a shirt probably lowers the average person’s IQ by at least forty points.”
I cover my face with both hands. “Please stop.”
