“You’re pregnant,” I muttered, slightly shocked that I didn’t freeze up again from the thought. “I don’t want you climbing on chairs or ladders. Thank you for the snack, though.”
She nodded and munched on an apple slice, still holding a fruit-covered plate in one hand. As she chewed, she took her time looking around the room, a sheen filling her gaze.
“Wow, things look…the same.”
I cleared my throat, trying to be as unaffected as possible by this entire thing. “Yeah, things don’t really change around here.”
Her eyes found me, and their impact was undeniable. Especially as she said, “You have.”
“I have,” I agreed. “You left, and it changed me. There’s really no denying that.”
She blinked—once, twice, almost as though stunned. Had she not expected me to agree? Did she not realize what it had done to me when she left?
“I wanted to come back,” she admitted, and now it was my turn to be stunned. Floored. I felt flattened to this worn carpet beneath me. “It was never supposed to be forever.”
When I tried to swallow and clear the seemingly perpetual dryness from my throat, it felt like razor blades were lodged in it.
“Eleanor,” I started, but then her body language changed, stilling as her gaze stopped on something just behind me. Her dark brows pulled together as she zeroed in on whatever it was.
Fuck, Iknewwhat it was.
My stomach tied itself in knots as she marched into the room, bringing a wave of cherry blossoms with her. She placed her apple plate absently on my bed, intent clear in her gaze. I swiveled, watching helplessly as she sank to the ground next to me, and it wasn’t until she reached for the box that I snapped out of it.
“I was just clearing out beneath my bed,” I said, grabbing the box before she could and attempting to push it back where it belonged. Unearthed beneath my mattress, safely tucked away. “I have a bunch of shit from high school I need to get rid of.”
“Wait.”
Ellie wasn’t deterred, hooking a finger in the corner of the box just as I moved it, causing a mess of pictures to spill over the side. Pictures and notes and movie tickets. A handful of them landed in Ellie’s lap.
“I don’t think you should get rid of any of this,” she said softly, picking one of the pictures up. And another, collecting them in her hand. “We could show these to our kid one day, so they know that at least at one time, we were…”
Happy.
In love.
Friends.
Ellie didn’t finish her sentence, which made me feel like I was having a heart attack again. She fell onto her back, lying on my bedroom floor and reminding me of how we’d spend nights staring up at glow-in-the-dark stars that my dad stuck on the ceiling when I was six. The ones I never took down because Ellie liked them.
But she wasn’t staring at the stars now. She was staring at the pictures, using them to shield her face from me.
I dug my fingers into the carpet. Once again, she was so close—her ankle almost touching mine—and I just wanted to reach out, drag her over to me so I could look at whatever she was looking at.
A soft noise, almost like a sniffle, made everythingworse.
Fuck.
Ellie couldn’t cry over old pictures of us. Because if Ellie cried, there was no way I’d be able to succeed in not touching her.
“Eleanor,” I rasped, and before I knew it, I was moving, crawling over her. But she was hugging the pictures closer to her face now, still using them as a shield as her whole body shook. “El.”
When she didn’t say anything, I plucked them out of her hands, but gently. I didn’t spare them a glance because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to handle seeing pictures of us together when we were younger. When we were happy. In love. Friends.
I put them down next to her head and shifted my attention to the only woman I’d ever wanted. And the only woman I should really stay away from, but knew I wouldn’t. Not when she was cry?—
Wait.
No.
