“Don’t,” I say quietly, already knowing I’m too late.
Her chin lifts. “I’m protecting you. This is for your own good.”
Before I can move, Shane and Will close the distance. Brandon grabs my legs. I react on instinct, but I pull my force at the last second because these are my friends, and this isn’t a fight I want to win.
We stumble backward onto the deck in a controlled mess of limbs and momentum. Shane pins my arms. Will brace my shoulders. Brandon moves quickly and efficiently, and I realize with a sharp flare of disbelief that they didn’t improvise this.
“You coordinated this?” I demand, half angry, half stunned.
“You don’t listen,” Shane says under his breath.
The rope appears from somewhere behind a patio chair. It’s not aggressive. It’s not rough. But it is intentional. They secure me to the lounge chair with more competence than I’m comfortable admitting. I test the tension onceand stop. I could break it if I wanted to. They know that. I know that. The point isn’t restraint.
The point is interruption. The point is, Andi wouldn’t have asked to do this unless she felt cornered.
Christina steps onto the patio, folds her arms, and surveys the scene with clinical amusement. “This,” she announces, “is what happens when two stubborn people try to martyr themselves at the same time.”
Andi walks toward me slowly. Her eyes are still red, but the fragile look from inside has strengthened into something steadier.
“This is what happens when you try to kidnap me,” she says.
“I was escorting you,” I correct automatically.
“You were physically relocating me against my will.”
I almost smile despite the rope. “Semantics.”
“It’s accountability,” she replies, and for a second, I see the youth-center director in her instead of the woman who just told me about knives and hospital rooms.
That’s when I understand what this really is. She isn’t humiliating me. She’s resetting the fight before we swing blindly.
“You think this fixes anything?” I ask,quieter now.
“No,” she says honestly. “But it buys us space.”
Space. The thing neither of us had in that living room.
I exhale slowly and let the tension leak out of my shoulders. “Terms of my surrender?”
She lists them carefully. No blocking exits. No physically intervening unless she asks. No unilateral protection decisions. I agree to all of it, repeating each promise without sarcasm because the truth is I’d rather negotiate than lose her.
When they untie me, I don’t lunge or argue. I stand slowly and stretch my shoulders, feeling the seriousness of what almost broke us.
She watches me cautiously. Then I do something neither of us planned. I catch her around the waist and pull her with me into the pool. The cold water steals the breath from both of us at the same time. We sink beneath the surface, and for a suspended second, everything is silent. No headlines. No political monsters. No history.
Just blue light and the muted thrum of water against tile. When we break the surface, she’s sputtering and furious and laughing all at once.
She admonishes me as she pushes wet hair from her face. “You lunatic! You are crazy!”
I wrap my arms around her and hold her afloat. "You’re probably right. I am crazy. Crazy about you. But I’m not leaving."
The edge in her expression softens. Not completely. Just enough.
Around us, our friends ease back into normalcy. Music starts low from the outdoor speakers. Shane drifts toward the grill. Brandon begins arguing about something trivial and sports related as if we didn’t nearly implode fifteen minutes ago.
Andi relaxes by degrees. I feel it in the way her body stops bracing against mine. In the way she laughs without forcing it.
For the first time since she started talking about the foster home, she isn’t carrying the whole past in her posture. And for the first time in weeks, Andi laughs without checking over her shoulder.
