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“Look. This is the zone.” She jumped off the counter, grabbed the whisk, and waved it like a wand. “The Soul Baring Zone. Whatever’s said within this space evaporates the moment we breech the walls.”
“Oh, we’re breeching now?”
“No.” She rolled her eyes. “We’re notwhales. We’re friends who share our deepest, darkest fears. Go.”
He shook his head. “You go first.”
“Okay.” She got back up on the counter. “I’m terrified I’m going to live my life doing the same exact thing. Making croissants, muffins, and turnovers.” He opened his mouth to say something, but she held up a finger. “I love my family. I love my life on Duff Island. At some point, I’ll figure something out. This is just me prying open the box that holds my deepest fears. Now that I know what passion is, I’m terrified I’ll never find it again. After we had sex, I understood what was missing with Ian and the other guys I’ve been with.”
Did she just mention sex as casually as a trip to the market?
And why did he like that so much? Because she didn’t have hang ups. That night, she’d had zero inhibitions—and that was so fucking hot.
“Now that I know what it can be like, I can’t believe I ever accepted mediocrity,” she said. “Like, what’s wrong with me?”
“Absolutely nothing. You didn’t have anything to compare it to before you came out here. In the past, you dated ponies. Now, you’ve had a stallion.” He grinned.
She whacked his arm.
“Okay, sorry. My point is…now that you know there’s something more, you’ll never settle for less.”
She drew in a sharp breath, her chest rising, her shoulders pushing back. “I should get a tattoo of that. Because I don’t want to go home, fall back into the routine, and then forget what it felt like to have something more.” She tapped him with her foot. “Your turn.”
One of the reasons he never talked about that night was because he didn’t want anyone’s judgment. It was enough to live with his own. But for whatever reason, he felt safe with her. And he found himself ready. “I dread seeing Booker. Hearing him tell me I ruined his life. It’s one thing to think I did but to hear it from him? To see the disgust in his eyes when he looks at me?”
“Then do it.”
“Talk to him?”
“Yes. Face him and apologize. Give him the chance to let you know exactly how he feels about what you did.”
Last summer, after Kurt’s funeral, he’d had his friends over for the first time in ten years. Booker had gone to the bathroom—and then left. Ghosted them.
Ghostedme.
“Go on,” she said gently.
“I’m terrified every day because I know you’re right, that we can’t change who we fundamentally are. And that means no matter how hard I try, no matter how hard I fight my impulses, I’m going to fuck up spectacularly again. Only this time, it’ll hurt Kinsley.”
“When you sayfuck up, what do you mean exactly? What did you do that night that caused Booker’s accident?”
“I got some bad news,” he began.
“Your parents were going to sell the ranch, so you gave up hockey to stay and help them.”
“Right. And instead of dealing with it, I made my friends come over.”
“Well, I mean, you didn’t make them. You asked them to come over and commiserate with you. It was your last chance because everyone was leaving the next day.”
“We’d already said goodbye. They were packed, ready to go. I never should’ve asked them to come over.”I never should’ve jumped.
Why the fuck did I jump?
“Okay, but again, you’re sayingfuck uplike there’s some fatal flaw in you.”
“There is. I’m selfish. I do what I want, and I don’t consider the consequences.”
“Wow, I’m not seeing that at all. In fact, I can’t think of a single thing you do for yourself, and if you were genuinely selfish, that’s all you’d be doing. And you wouldn’t care. Is Kinsley selfish?”
