Page 58 of The Other Room

We lay back quietly and passed the wine back and forth while the sky awakened. First one, then another, and with each passing minute more streaks shot across the sky.

“I love the Perseids. Seriously. It’s so cool, isn’t it?” Jo sighed.

“It’s pretty amazing.”

The boat bobbed along the water, and I listened to her breathing and the soft lapping of the waves on the hull.

Just tell her.

“I’m glad we’re friends again,” I started, hoping the speech I’d been preparing would come back to me. At the moment, that was the only line I could remember.

“Me, too.”

“Yeah. I’m glad you forgave me.”

“As long as you stay the hell away from Nikki and never touch another taken woman again, we’re good.”

“Never. Never ever. I still don’t know what the hell came over me.”

She snorted. “Ah, come on. I’m not stupid. I saw the little hussy flirting with you for years. I didn’t think you’d go there, but it’s not like this was all on you.”

“Yeah. Hindsight is twenty/twenty. I should have told Jake the first time she flirted with me. I didn’t want to hurt him.”

“You did a bang-up job with that.” Jo scoffed, then smiled.

“Yeah. Really bang-up job.”

“Well, I guess since you were...” her voice drifted off for a beat, “in love with her, I can kinda see the predicament you were in.”

“I only thought I had feelings for her. More like a long-standing infatuation which was actually just a distraction.”

“A distraction? From what?”

You.

An in. I should take it. Blurt it out. But instead my tongue tied up in knots and I just shrugged.

This was impossible.

As a wave of fear gripped me, I wondered how the hell was I supposed to tell Jo how I felt? What if she said no? What if she laughed at me, threw me out of her cabin and out of her life? Then what?

And what if she doesn’t?

Still struggling to blurt it out, I shrugged. “Just things.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Well,” I swallowed hard.

Now or never.

“When Nikki came to school, she was the girl who helped me get over my broken heart.”

“A broken heart from who?”

With a sigh, I forced the truth out of my mouth. “From you.”

“What?” Jo whipped her head toward me, but I kept staring at the stars, too scared to make eye contact. “What are you talking about?”