But everything did crack.
And for the first time in my life…
I’m glad.
Because Jamie didn’t just slip into the broken pieces.
He’s the one who’s helping me put them back together.
****
The house is too quiet when I walk in.
No laughter. No show playing on Jamie’s laptop. No off-key humming from the kitchen. Just silence.
He’s here—I can feel him in the walls—but he hasn’t spoken to me in three days.
Three days without his voice.
Three days without touching him, or hearing him laugh, or watching him pretendhe doesn’t care when I steal the blanket from him.
Three days since I fucked everything up.
I drop my backpack at my door and cross the hallway to his room before I lose my nerve. I don’t knock. I just opened the door.
Jamie jerks in place, sitting cross-legged on his bed with a textbook in his lap. He looks up at me—and flinches.
That one tiny movement guts me.
“We need to talk,” I say.
He laughs under his breath, bitter and sharp.
“No kidding.”
I step inside and shut the door behind me, because even after all this silence, theinstinct to keep us private is ingrained in me like a damn reflex.
Jamie snaps his book shut.
“What do you want, Lex?”
“To fix this.”
“There’s nothing to fix.”
But his voice cracks. Barely, but enough to punch a hole in my ribcage.
The Fight.
Fuck. I shouldn’t have said it. I shouldn’t have let my friends hype me up. I shouldn’t have turned around and spit the worst thing possible out of my mouth.
Three days ago, in the middle of a crowded hallway, one of my teammates had nudged me.
“Yo, Rothwell, your stepbrother is staring again.”
And I’d looked over—saw Jamie across the hall with his notebook, just existing, just looking beautiful—and instead of shutting it down, I went for the kill.
I said loudly,
