“Your feelings for me?”
“Yeah. I like you, Micah... way too much. But I know you don’t feel that way about me, and I totally accept that. I want to be your friend, agoodfriend, and I’m so sorry my ego got in the way of that.”
“Are you done?”
“Yup. But don’t say a word.” I scrambled off his bed. “Don’t say anything, please? I promise I’ll be a normal person in the morning. I gotta go. Night.”
“Sam—”
I fled the room without letting him speak, and the irony wasn’t lost on me that it was how we’d got into this mess in the first place. But I had to go. I couldn’t face him blunting his usual sharp tongue with forced diplomacy as he tried to let me down gently. He didn’t need to do it any more than I had needed to spill my guts to him in the first place.
Shame that thought came way too late.
I flopped down on my own bed. For a moment, I imagined I heard him get up and shuffle across the carpet, but it was all in my head. Silence was my only companion.
Tired, I undressed and crawled into bed. The sheets smelt of the same lavender fabric conditioner we used at home, and I hoped perhaps the smell would help Micah settle. He’d told me before he didn’t sleep well in new places. That away games had often left him so sleep deprived he could barely kick the ball straight. His confession had explained why he’d paced our living room every night for the first two weeks he’d lived with me, his leg dragging behind him. Now it made my heart ache so bad I knew I’d be awake forever.
It was two in the morning when his text came through.
Micah:stop making assumptions about how i feel
8
Micah
I woke with a jump to textured wallpaper and a bed that smelt like good dreams. Not that I’d had any dreams. One moment I’d been staring at my phone screen, the next it had been, well, now.
The house was deadly quiet. I rolled over and scowled at my blank phone screen. I’d stayed awake for hours hoping Sam would respond to my cryptic non-message, but he hadn’t. And why the hell would he? It wasn’t as if I’d confessed that I liked him way too much too. And now it was arse o’clock in the morning and I was awake once again to be all up in my feelings.
Awesome.
My bladder drove me out of bed. I opened the door like a ninja, but there was no need; Sam’s bed was empty.
The bathroom was at the end of the hall. The floorboards creaked beneath my feet and I cringed with every step until I made it. I took a piss and contemplated returning to the unfamiliar bedroom that somehow smelt like home. I was bone-tired, but not knowing where Sam was sent anxiety dancing through my veins, and I knew I wouldn’t find rest again until I’d found him.
I shuffled downstairs, half expecting to find his parents in the kitchen, still frying chips, but there was no one about. I poked around in the maze of quirky rooms, one after the other, wincing each time a door hinge whined, which was every fucking time. The last room was a den in the downstairs section of the extension—a small room with a patchwork couch and a flat-screen TV. Sam was curled up under a blanket watching an old episode ofERon mute.
“You realise Dr Kovac is only hot when he opens his mouth, right?”
Sam snapped his gaze to me, eyes wide. “Fuck. I didn’t hear you come down. Everything okay?”
I limped to the couch and perched on the arm. “Yeah. Just woke up in a strange place, you know?”
“I know.”
Of course he did. Sam listened to me when I spoke and remembered everything I told him. Because he cared. Because he liked me as much as I liked him. More. Maybe. Who the fuck knew?
My head was spinning. I slid over the arm of the couch and landed beside him. “I’m too messed up to be what you want.”
It wasn’t what I’d meant to say, not even close. But it was the truth.
Sam closed his eyes briefly and shook his head. “You’re not too fucked up foranything.”
“Dude, I have to take pills to get out of bed in the morning, I can’t sleep, I can’t figure out if how I feel on any given day is real or a side effect of that shit, and the only thing I’m good for is training geriatrics.”
Sam flinched as if the influx of negativity was too much for him and it would take a moment for him to unpick it. “You take medication because you’ve been hurt. That doesn’t make you unworthy of living. Besides, I already told you what I want is to be your friend, which I kind of thought we were already doing until I messed it up by passing judgement on a situation I knew nothing about.”
“That wasn’t your fault.”
