Page 62 of Beautiful When He Breaks

“You didn’t always look at him like this exactly,” he goes on before I can find a lie decent enough to use, gesturing vaguely between us as if the shape of my crisis is visible in the room. “But you’ve never been fully straight about him either—anyone with eyes could see the way you look at Jules. You admire him too much and orbit him without realizing it. When you’re pissed at him, it looks personal in a way that doesn’t happen with anybody else. When he’s hurting, you feel it before he says anything. I honestly assumed you’d work it out eventually.”

I stare at him in open betrayal. “You assumed I’d… what?”

“Work it out.” He tilts his head. “I didn’t know when. I definitely didn’t know it would be after your daughter arrived and the whole house got drafted into a duck cult, but life’s weird.”

I run a hand through my hair and pull. “That is insane.”

“No,” Luca says. “You just don’t like hearing it.”

I get up and pace once to the window because sitting still while he calmly rewrites my whole internal narrative feels impossible. “I am not orbiting him.”

“You literally came to my room after midnight because you can’t stop thinking about him.”

“That is unrelated.”

Luca lets out one short laugh. “Sure.”

I turn and point at him. “Stop doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Acting like this is obvious.”

He leans both palms back on the mattress and looks at me with the kind of patient annoyance he usually reserves for receivers who miss route changes.

“Eli, you want me to lie to you and say this came out of nowhere? Because I can, but it’ll be a shitty lie, and you’ll know it.”

I drag a hand down my face. “Jesus Christ.”

“No, different guy.”

That gets another involuntary laugh out of me, and I hate that it helps. Then the humor drops away again, because I didn’t come here for jokes even if I apparently need them to keep from crawling out of my own skin.

“I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” I say quietly and stop pacing, then lean against the dresser, folding my arms over my chest. “I keep trying to tell myself it’s just because of everything that happened. He’s there all the time. He helps with Mila and is the one person who can calm me down when I’m losing it. We’ve been through too much together. So maybe I’m just… attached, or whatever. Maybe it’s gratitude. Maybe it’s stress.”

Luca watches me for a second before saying, “Do you want my real answer?”

“I came here, didn’t I?”

“Yeah,” he says. “And my real answer is that stress doesn’t usually make a guy start undressing his best friend with his eyes.”

My face goes hot so fast it almost hurts. “W-what?”

He actually has the nerve to look sympathetic. “Oh, come on.”

“You noticed?” I squeak.

Luca rolls his eyes. “I’m a football captain who kept a drug addiction secret for years. Of course I noticed you eye-fucking Jules in the locker room.”

My whole body fills with mortification. “Fuck.”

“It wasn’t subtle.”

I close my eyes. “I’m going to throw myself out the window.”

“No, you’re not. You’re going to sit back down and let the Bi Godmother guide you through this.”

I open my eyes and look at him. “The what?”