Page 66 of Scorpio Season

She grabs her headphones from her bed and triple-checks that the key card for the room is in her pocket. Then she tiptoes outside and quietly pulls the door shut behind her.

At half past nine, the air is still mild. Luca runs a trail that retraces some of the streets they walked over the last two days. It always takes a few minutes to convince her body that running this early is a good idea, but after a while, Luca falls into an easy rhythm.

As a hyperactive child that needed to be physically tired out before she could be asked to sit down and do any kind of schoolwork, her parents had her try out every sports program there was to be found in Kent. She played football, basketball, tennis. She went skating. She took swimming lessons. Once, she even went horseback riding. Now that she’s an adult, she usually just goes running or biking or lifts weights at the gym. She loves how it feels when she can’t hear her own thoughts over her heartbeat and the music pounding in her ears.

She’s not quite there yet. As she picks her way through the cobblestone streets, her thoughts return, again and again, to last night: to Florence singing “Happy Birthday” to Toni, radiant in the spotlight. To the way her eyes glinted while she and Luca sang together. To the curl of her lips when she held Luca’s gaze and said, I’m keeping you.

Luca wipes the sweat from her eyes with the back of her hand and ups the volume on her music, something fast-paced with a heavy kick drum. Her thighs are burning, but she keeps pushing.

The thing is, Luca is no stranger to friendships that feel like this. When she was fifteen, she had a best friend who would call her “babe” and sit in her lap during breaks at school. When she was sixteen, one of the girls in her friend group kissed her at three different parties. They never spoke about it, but when Luca found her on social media a few months ago, she had a little bisexual flag in her bio. At the beginning of her first relationship, she wasn’t sure they were dating until Heather introduced her as her girlfriend to her friends. It never occurred to her to ask.

The point is, Luca is good at going with the flow. She doesn’t ask for anything or make demands. She has always been happy to take what she’s given.

What she and Florence have doesn’t have to be any different. Compared to those other times, this is straightforward: They had sex once, and now they don’t. They’re friends. They can sit together at midnight and share a bed and maybe flirt a little in the dark corner of a karaoke bar, but none of it means anything. They’re friends and nothing else, no matter how strange Luca’s heart feels when she’s around Florence or how a part of her missed Florence in her bed last night.

It should be a relief, knowing clearly where she stands.

She comes to a stop at a red light, pulse hammering in her ears. There’s a bitter taste in her mouth. She can still hear her thoughts.

Her hands fumble for her phone.

Luca:

I’m fucked

Henry:

not literally i hope????? i thought you swore abstinence

Luca:

Have you ever had a friend you spent all day thinking about?

Mason:

This feels like a rhetorical question

Henry: