Page 127 of The Best Shot

He said my name again behind me.

I kept walking.

I made it to my car before I cried, but only for a minute.

Just long enough to grieve the distance opening between us.

36

“HIS NAME IS HARRY.”

YASMINE

Things were fine.

That’s what I told myself, and told everyone else, too. And on a good day, believed about sixty percent of it.

He texted. I texted back.

He asked if I wanted to come over Thursday and I said I was busy, which was true. I had a packing list that kept mutating, and a two-hour call with the NSF field coordinator that made my brain feel like it was melting.

Friday he suggested dinner. I told him I had plans with the girls, then spent the evening alone reorganizing a camera bag that did not need reorganizing.

Saturday I had a shoot.

One of those was a lie. All of them were convenient as hell.

I wasn’t proud of it. I was trying to do the adult thing, which is not the same as actually being an adult, but close enough to pass.

He’d said no.

He had his reasons. People always have reasons.

And I was a grown-ass woman about to spend six months in Antarctica photographing emperor penguins. I was not going to waste the last few weeks before I left nursing a bruise I wasn’t even supposed to have.

When I asked him to come with me, some stupid, hopeful part of me had assumed the answer would be yes. Not because the timing was perfect or the logistics were easy, but because it was me asking. Because I wanted him there. Because somewhere in the last several months we’d become the kind of people who showed up for each other, and I’d apparently built a whole future out of that.

Turns out I’d been carrying a picture of us he never agreed to pose for.

It took me a few days to swallow that.

It took him about the same amount of time to get tired of me dodging him.

The knock came just after six.

I opened the door expecting Annie, since she was the only person who came by without warning.

It wasn’t Annie.

Hale usually carried himself loose and easy. Today he looked wound tight beneath the skin.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

We stood there in that awkward little pause until he nodded toward the street.

“Come for a ride.”