I fail.
I start laughing.
Full-on, chest-shaking, completely inappropriate laughter. The kind I don’t do often and definitely not first thing in the morning in a bed I probably shouldn’t be in with the daughter of my best friend lying three inches away.
“Jon?” she asks, offended and amused at the same time. “What?”
“It’s—” I gesture vaguely, the earbud cord tugging between us. “It’s just—of all the songs—”
She pulls her phone closer, suspicion already narrowing her eyes. “What?”
“Older,” I say. “Isabel LaRosa.”
Her eyes widen.
“Oh my God.”
“You’re twenty-one going on eighty,” I tease. “You know that, right?”
She smacks my arm. “Says the man who listens to classic rock and war ballads.”
“Those are respectable.”
“They’re depressing.”
“They’re seasoned.”
She laughs, real and bright, and for a moment the world feels… normal. Which is maybe the most dangerous feeling of all.
“You are not allowed to judge my music taste,” she says, trying and failing to sound severe. “You literally have songs that sound like they were recorded in a bunker during the Cold War.”
I put a hand over my chest. “That is slander.”
“It’s accurate,” she shoots back. “Half your playlist sounds like a man going through a divorce he hasn’t admitted yet.”
I bark out another laugh. “And you’re lying in bed listening to a song calledOlderlike some tragic Victorian widow.”
She narrows her eyes. “Get out.”
“No.”
“Then suffer.”
She turns the volume up one click just to be spiteful.
I grin, shake my head, and settle back against the pillow. “You’re impossible.”
“And yet,” she says, tilting her chin just slightly, “here you are.”
That lands lower than she means it to. Or maybe exactly where she means it to. Hard to tell with her.
We lie there like that for a while, sharing earbuds, shoulders touching, neither of us in any rush to face reality. The song changes once, then again. Her thumb moves lazily over the screen. The silence between us isn’t heavy this morning. It’s soft. Warm. The kind that asks for nothing except staying exactly where we are a little longer.
I watch the light shift higher on the wall. She traces idle patterns against the blanket with one finger. At one point, she yawns and tucks herself a fraction closer without seeming to realize she’s done it, and my whole body goes still around the instinct to pull her all the way in.
Eventually, reality wins.
It always does.
