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“Hey.” I walk farther inside and set the meatloaf and utensils on her dresser. “You wanna talk about it?”
She tucks a strand of light brown hair behind her ear. “About us?”
“About us and whatever’s bothering you…” I come forward and try to catch her amber eyes again, but they’re running away from me. “What happened? After I left?”
I’m an inch from Luna, so close that I hear her uneven breath and feel the warmth radiating off her body.
She works her jaw to keep waterworks at bay, I think. “I’m disappointed in myself.” She blinks and finally looks up at me. “I had a…kinda meltdown. In front of my whole family.” Her cheeks flush.
For someone so unashamed most of the time, I hate seeing her filled with regret.
I dip my head down to be closer to her. “Couldn’t have been a bigger scene than the time I streaked through a Yale quidditch match.”
She almost smiles. “Yale has quidditch?” Her tiny, fragile voice is killing me.
I nod. “Got a lot of stiff wand jokes tossed at me. Caught ‘em all.”
“Did you eat them?”
“All of ‘em. Tasted like magic.”
“You probably levitated.”
“All the way home.” We haven’t broken eye contact, and somehow, I feel like I’m cradling her in my arms and holding her against my chest. Though, I know, an unbearable space is between us.
She whispers, “Um, I pulled my bookcase off the wall. It almost came down on me…and my mom and sister. And that’s…that’s after I trashed my room.” Her eyes well up. “I think Kinney thought it’d make me feel better, but it made me feel worse.”
“Yeah, I learned early on that throwing things around just makes everything harder to clean up.”
“I’m about to be twenty-one,” she says softly. “And tonight, I just feel like…a kid who can’t control their emotions. A problem child that should’ve matured out of being a problem.”
I instinctively clasp her hand, encasing mine around hers. “You were upset. Being emotional doesn’t mean you’re immature. I think you’re just not used to it.”
“To what?” she murmurs.
“Showing people your emotions. At least the sad and dark ones.”
Luna responds so quietly that I almost mishear her say, “It’s been easier with you.”
Yeah. “I feel that too,” I breathe, but a knot twists in my lungs.
She lets go of my hand first. She steps forward and then steps back like an invisible wall is separating us. She wraps her arms around her bare waist, hugging herself.
It’s a struggle just watching her.
I want to give her a real hug, but the wall exists for me too. Tension thickens in our silence, and I do my best not to dig for my cigarettes.
Her nipples have hardened, budding up against her metallic bra. My cock stirs, blood heating as I watch her gaze stroke my body and the angles of my jaw. I try not imagining lifting Luna and burying my face in her pussy.
I just follow the route of her eyes as they explore me.
She seems sad. Like she’s trying to find pieces of me that’ve been locked away.
“I know you said we’re written in the stars,” Luna whispers, her eyes on mine again. “But what does that mean for right now? The more I try to understand, the more confused I get. Like we’re just us but less than us, than what we were yesterday?”
That hurts.
Everywhere.
I grip the edge of her desk where the fishbowl rests, steadying myself. “We’re not less,” I say. “We’ll never be less.” I’m not sure if it’s the truth or if I’m just hoping.
“Then what are we?” Her brows bunch together. “We can’t be boyfriend and girlfriend. But we’re more than friends, right?”
My muscles flex. Breath shortens.
“No,” I say, even if every word pains me. “We’re not more than friends.”
Luna blinks, and her face cinches like she’s been stabbed. “Oh…”
My throat swells. “Not yet,” I remind her. “We can be more than friends after I take care of my family situation. But I made a promise to your dad to wait for you, and I am very shit at keeping my promises to him. But this one, I want to keep. I need to keep.”
She inches backwards, creating more excruciating distance between us. “I’m going to make it easy for you.”
Don’t.
My eyes burn. “Don’t make it easy.”
“I don’t want to be a reason you break a promise,” she says more quietly.
“You won’t be.” I skate a hand through my hair. “I just don’t want avoidance to be a thing here.”
I don’t want to lose you, Luna.
I don’t want her to fall in love with someone else. I don’t want her to leave me.
She thinks. “Just friends?”
“Friends,” I nod.
“Only friends.” She nods over and over like she can cement the status of us in place, like she can be okay with it, and I’ve fallen so deep for her, I can’t even crawl out of the hole I’m in.
