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She leans in. I lean back. Her eyes widen, filled with hurt. Slowly, she sinks back from my hips and slides onto the chaise. I tug my good foot back quickly, spinning so I sit sideways on the chaise, my face buried in my hands.
“Sebastian, talk to me. I can’t…I can’t tell what’s going on, what you’re thinking. It’s hard to read you, and that makes me so anxious. Please just say it, whatever it is, whether you’re mad at me or you’re regretting it, just—”
“Hey.” Turning, I tug her into my arms and hold her tight as I tuck her head against my shoulder, just the way I wanted to when I saw her at the roller rink. Ziggy sets her arms around my waist and turns toward me, too. Slowly, I feel her relax into me.
“Why did you pull away?” she whispers.
“Because, that shouldn’t have happened. And I needed to be sure it wouldn’t happen again. That’s why I pulled away.”
Ziggy pulls back enough to peer at me, her head tipped, hurt tightening her eyes. “Why shouldn’t it have happened?”
I smooth back her hair as the wind drags it across her face, so her eyes can find mine while I tell her the truth for once: “Because you asked me to be your friend, Ziggy, and I’m hardly worthy of that, but I’d like to be. Don’t ask more of me, please, not when…not when I could never…”
Never be enough, never deserve more of you, never be worthy of more than this.
She stares at me, confusion tingeing her expression. I can’t make myself finish that sentence, can’t make myself speak that damning admission into the air between us. Even if it’s true. Even if I know myself—that while tonight shook me up, and I do know I want to find a different way forward, to focus more on the good in my life, I’m so marred by my past, so inexperienced at trying to be anything but selfish and spiteful, there are so many ways I could fail her if I ever tried to be anything more to her than this.
“So…” Ziggy swallows, biting her lip. “Friends?”
I shrug, brushing back another wisp of hair from her temple. “Despite what a giant pain in my ass you can be—”
She pokes my armpit, trying for a tickle spot, and relief rushes through me. There’s that fiery playfulness, a faint, sweet smile warming her mouth.
“Yes,” I tell her. “Friends.”
“Like how we started?” she asks quietly. “Like…when it was just pretend?”
“No. Not how we started. How we ended up. Real. Real—” It takes two tries to get it past this sudden, sharp lump in my throat, to tell her the lie we’re both better off believing. “Friends. If you still want even that from me, after all this.”
Ziggy stares at me in that keen, incisive way, her body entirely still, but for the wind whipping her hair. Finally, she stands from the chaise and tucks those long copper strands behind her ears, glancing around the balcony until she finds her wrap. She leans down and picks it up, turns it over in her hands, but she doesn’t put it on. God, I wish she would. Now that I’ve seen her in that dress, I’m very grateful she had it wrapped up all night. I wouldn’t have been able to carry on coherent conversation at the party. Every single person there would have known just exactly how bad I have it for her.
Slowly, Ziggy glances my way, then offers me her hand. “Well, friend…” She says the word gently, kindly. A smile tips her mouth as I wrap my hand around hers and squeeze, the way she likes, the way I know she’ll squeeze right back. “Got a pair of sweatpants I can borrow?”
“So.” Ziggy pops another spoonful of strawberry ice cream into her mouth and looks at me, eyes narrowed from her end of my sofa.
She’s wearing one of my black Kings hoodies, a pair of my gray sweatpants, and her hair’s braided down past her shoulder. I want depraved, delicious things from her.
Which is why I’m sitting seven feet away, at the other end of my sofa with a pillow on my lap.
Eating pretzel after pretzel scraped through my pint of rocky road, I’ve been trying to talk down my erection by remembering the last time Kris—who I do not find attractive—streaked across the locker room, singing Cher’s “Believe” horribly off pitch at the top of his lungs.
It’s not working.
“So,” I offer.
“We,” Ziggy says after swallowing her bite, “need to talk about the fact that you went to Ren like this is some Regency romance and reassured him that my virtue was safe.”
I almost choke on my mouthful of ice cream and pretzels. “I said absolutely nothing about your virtue.”
She spears the spoon back into her ice cream and carves out another bite. “It’s implicit in what you said. You told him I was ‘safe.’”
“Because I do want you to be safe with me. Your body. Your emotions. All of you. And, given what a reckless piece of work I tend to be, it was important for him to know that I was committed to that.”
Ziggy pauses, spoon heaped with ice cream hovering at her mouth. She takes a lick and stares at me. “I understand why you wanted to tell him, to make sure your friendship with him doesn’t suffer while we do this.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, I just wish the focus hadn’t been so much about protecting me, ya know?”
