Page 122

This was the right choice. The safe choice. The professional choice.

It was also the choice that felt like losing a championship on a buzzer-beater I should have defended.

My house, my carefully controlled, perfectly private sanctuary, felt haunted now. By her laughter in the hallway. By her voice saying basketball like it was the funniest word in the world. By the sounds she'd made when she came, and the way she'd looked up at me from my bed with my belt around her wrists like I was worth the risk of her heart.

I'd spent twelve years building walls to keep people out, to keep myself safe.

In one night, Harper DuBose had walked through every single one of them like they were made of paper.

She'd seen me. Really seen me. She'd let me be myself in ways I'd never been able to be with anyone else, and she'd given me her trust with both hands, and I'd held it so carefully all night long.

And then, in the morning, I'd set it down and let her carry it out the door alone.

"Fuck," I said to my empty house.

It didn't answer.

Because that was what safety got you. Empty houses and hollow victories and clean sheets nobody had slept in, and nights alone because being seen felt too dangerous.

I'd made my choice.

Now, I had to live with it.

Even if living with it felt like losing the only game that had ever really mattered.

15

I'm Over It

Harper

The SHAU4 was silent except for the hum of tires on asphalt and the occasional ping of the driver's GPS recalculating routes I didn't care about.

I sat in the back seat with my forehead pressed against the cool window and watched the sky go from pink to pale gold over the hills. It would have been beautiful if I could feel more than numb. It was a little after six on a Saturday, and the city was just starting to wake up. A guy in a reflective vest was hosing down the sidewalk in front of a bakery. Somebody was jogging with a chunky golden retriever who clearly hadn't consented to the jog.

Not one of them had just walked out of the best night of their life wearing the wrong number, with their heart still sitting on a bed in the hills.

The jersey had Trish's name on it. Which sucked, honestly, because it meant I was going home wearing the one name in that house that wasn't hers or mine.

The driver glanced at me in the rearview mirror. Then at my neck. Then, very quickly, back to the road.

I pulled the collar up as high as it would go. It didn't help. I'd seen the bruises in Cam's bedroom mirror while I was pulling my jeans on, and I'd decided not to look at them again until I was alone, and I'd been doing very well at that until a man named Darius with four point nine stars glanced at me like I was a crime scene personified.

My phone sat in my lap, dark and silent. I didn't unlock it. I couldn't bear to see the lack of any text from Cam saying she'd changed her mind, that she'd come out for me, that we could make this work.

Because that text wouldn't come.

She'd let me go. She'd stood in her entryway in sweats and bare feet and let me ask her not to walk me out, and she'd listened, because she always listened, because that was the whole goddamn problem. She'd listened to every word because she cared.

And I'd left because staying would have destroyed me eventually, even if leaving was destroying me now.

The driver pulled up outside my building at 6:41. I thanked him on autopilot, gave him five stars on autopilot, and started up the stairs.

Halfway up, I sat down on the landing for a second, and sitting hurt.

Sitting hurt a lot.

I'll feel this tomorrow and think about you every time I sit down, I'd told her last night, smug and happy in her arms. Hilarious. Great joke. Ten out of ten. I was a comedic genius, and the universe had decided to take me up on it.