Teddy looks amused. “I know. I’m just being a gentleman.”
“Yeah, but I’m fine on my own, so you don’t have to beso…”
“What?”
“Overbearing.”
He laughs. “I am not.”
“You are. You were doing this in San Francisco too. You started acting like a mother hen the moment…”
“What?”
I frown at him. “The moment you saw me cry.” As we pass beneath a streetlamp, his face flickers in the shadows. “And I get it. I fell apart. But that doesn’t mean you need to treat me like I’m this fragile—”
He holds up his hands. “Whoa,” he says. “That’s what you think?”
“Well, what am I supposed to think? You spent the rest of the trip following me around like…”
“A mother hen?” he suggests with a smile.
I ignore this. “It obviously freaked you out enough to make you go AWOL the moment we got back—”
“I told you I was at the library,” he says distractedly, glancing over at the stores lining the street, then he raises a finger. “Hold on a second, okay? I’ll be right back.”
“What?” I say, surprised, but he’s already gone, jogging over to the bank on the corner, where he disappears inside the ATM vestibule. Alone on the sidewalk I lift my hands likeCan you believe this guy?But of course nobody’s paying attention, so I just wait there until he returns, tucking his wallet into the back pocket of his jeans.
“Sorry,” he says, then without any sort of explanation he just picks up where we left off. “I didn’t go AWOL. All that stuff this afternoon? Those binders you guys refused to even open? That took a lot of work.That’swhat I was doing. It had nothing to do with you.”
There’s a slight hitch in his step as he says this, as if he’s about to stop walking, but then he ducks his head and keeps going, his jaw set.
This is the part where I’m supposed to let it go. To tell him it’s fine. To give him the benefit of the doubt. But for some reason I can’t. Not yet.
“I don’t believe you,” I say quietly. “I think you got scared. You say that you want me to be honest with you, that you don’t just want to be the guy who cheers me up, but then you see me crumble like that, you get one glimpse of the real me, and—”
“Don’t say that,” he says in a low voice. “It’s insulting.”
I glance over at him, startled. “What is?”
“You can’t act like I don’t know the real you. We’ve been friends for nine years. And yeah, I know you’ve been through a lot, and I know you don’t talk about it very often, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know you. I know you better than you think.”
“Then you should know not to treat me like I’m breakable.” The words have a bite to them that I didn’t intend, but I’m frustrated and annoyed and a little bit angry, the way I only ever seem to get around Teddy.
He shakes his head. “I don’t—”
“You do,” I say. “And you of all people should know how much I hate that.”
He frowns. “Why me of all people?”
Because,I want to say.We’ve both been through things that should’ve broken us.
Because we both survived them.
“Never mind,” I say, walking faster. “It’s just—”
Once more, he holds up a finger, and I stop midsentence.
“Just a minute,” he says, dashing off in the direction of a drugstore. I let out an indignant sigh, realizing I’m definitely going to be late now, then spend the next seven minutes kicking absently at a mailbox and stewing over our interrupted conversation.
