I wet my lips, dragging the bottom through my teeth as the memories start to resonate. “I learned how to drive on this.” It’s like a low, warm hum, remembering life with my step dad, and it pulls a smile from deep inside me.
Her face falls. “You’re jokin’?”
“I would not joke about this,” I laugh, chancing another glance her way. She’s shaking her head in disbelief, and I cantell something is churning inside her. “I mean, it’s just a coincidence, Sloane.”
“I don’t believe in those,” she says, slight alarm etched in a crease above her brow.
“Oh, right. You believe in God,” I tell her, flicking my gaze to the cross charm on her bracelet.
“I’m spiritual—there’s a difference,” she rebuffs, like the notion is an insult.
“Nothing wrong with it. Pretty sure Will went through a church phase…” I peter off just as she playfully knocks my arm. We take a left, getting closer.
“I just believe there’s a right way this is all supposed to go. And if that’s the case, nothin’s a coincidence.” She nibbles on her lip. “When you’re out of tune with yourself, with God or the universe, you get lost.”
“So if this isn’t a coincidence, what is it?” I don’t look at her when I ask it, just swallow against the wind the whips around us.
“A sign, I guess,” she says, helplessly. I flick my gaze over, watching as she traces her lips with one manicured finger. “That I’m headin’ in the right direction.”
“Towards me?” I joke, secretly self-deprecating, because if anything the universe should be steering her well clear of me.
“Maybe,” she admits, and my jaw twitches. “Maybe we were meant to be friends.”
I hum, nodding my head to myself as guilt churns deep in my gut. I wonder if she can feel it, the way we’re actually pulled together by a thread that isn’t cosmic, but entirely fucking manmade; if she can feel the times I tried to snip it, only for her to tie it back together. A thread, knotted in places that make all of this stronger than it needed to be.
“What happened to ‘it’s-definitely-not-fate’Sloane?”
We pull to a light, the only car there, and wait.
“She realized you’re not a total ass-hat.”
“So it’s fate when you like me, a coincidence when you don’t?” I chuckle, wrapping my hand tighter around the steering wheel. I lean against the inside of the car door, knowing I could just blow this light. There’s no cameras, but I like the way her stare’s trying to dig into my soul, like there’s something worth inspecting there.
“I neverdidn’tlike you,” she mutters, mostly to herself, the light shifting to green.
We coast toward Will’s building, me unwilling to throttle the engine and her unwilling to ask me too. Like we both know this peace is about to be shattered.
“So you really think there’s a right way in all of this?”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
Her certainty sends a flash of regret through me, and wonder what it’s like to still believe that everyone,everything, is good.
“I think what’s right for one person is wrong for another. And that feels pretty hellish to me. Doesn’t feel divine at all.” On some level, she has to know this. She can’t have existed in this world and skated past the realization that there’s a cost to everything.
She considers it, purses her lips before nodding.
“I think in the end, it all works out,” she says, her voice tinged with brittle hope as we park in front of Will’s building. I can see Gen, head in her hands, on a bench, and that hope does fuck all to prepare me for whatever I’ll find upstairs.
“Well…this is you,” I joke, and Sloane huffs on a thin smile, making no move to leave.
“And that’s you.” She tips her head toward the top of the building, rolling her lips together. “I had fun tonight. Makes me wonder why I didn’t give in to fate sooner.”
Because I don’t want to be just friends. Because I don’t wantto be more but betray you. Because I don’t know how to do anything real anymore.
“I should get up there,” I say instead, watching her lashes flutter one too many times when I change the subject. Her recovery is impressive, her eyes rolling at Will’s mention.
“Everyone needs a cheerleader,” she laments as she steps out of the car. “Night, Spellman.”
