“I can definitely teach you how to do that wrong. You haven’t lived until you’ve turned all of your underwear pink.”
His breath shudders out of him like he’s been afraid I’d tell him no.
That I’m abandoning him.
As if I could.
Most of my family abandoned me. Most of my friends too.
I won’t do that to another soul who needs me.
Even Oliver, who’s the last person I should be helping, for so many reasons.
I’m not fooling myself. I know when he saysI like you, what he means ismy life is a mess and you’re helping me and thereare too many big feelings for me to sort through all of them and understand the difference between liking you and appreciating the help from anyone who’d be in your shoes.
Even if I know Idolike him.
That I’m setting myself up for complete and total wreckage of my heart.
But Bea saved me once. She took in a friend and showed me how to survive when she already had her brothers and a lot of other things on her plate.
And I believe in nothing if not the karmic balance of the universe.
So it doesn’t matter that my toes are still tingling from that orgasm and my recently dormant vagina is hoping this hug goes somewhere else, a clear sign that I need to leave.
Oliver still needs me.
Oliver stillwantsme.
And so I’ll stay.
23
I THINK IT’S YOU
Oliver
Daphne talks in her sleep.
Not all night—just in the morning, as the sunlight slowly seeps in through the curtains that I didn’t close all of the way last night.
“Bear cave turned the car inside out,” she mumbles.
I’m barely breathing as I lie beside her on the bed, watching her facial muscles twitch and her eyelids flutter.
We agreed to share the bed last night.
She put a pillow wall between us, becausesex lessons are over for tonight, which I interpreted to mean that I shouldn’t have told her that I like her.
Even though I hate it, the pillow wall is still there.
My cock is painfully hard.
Staring at her isn’t helping. Not when I’m noticing things I never did before.
Like how thick her lashes are. Long, too.
The way she has tiny ears that make her simple stud earrings—all four of them in the ear that I can see—seem bigger than they are.
