Page 90 of All the way home

“Good friends don’t—don’t wedge themselves in where they haven’t been asked to,” Rena told her, tears burning.

She’d regretted saying it as soon as it was out.

Without another word, Sahar had turned around and left her standing there on the balcony.

These words—these utterly meaningless words, staring each other down in the middle of a busy airport terminal—are the first words they’ve spoken to each other ever since.

Bile rises. Rena feels sick with guilt, sick with a regret that’s been permeating every thought she’s had of that night ever since it happened.

“I have to go,” Rena blurts out.

Sahar looks neither surprised or disappointed. She just gives Rena the same even, inscrutable look she’d given her that awful night, and does not say a word to stop her.

Unsettled, Rena walks away, not looking back.

Even by the time she gets back to the gate, that uncertainty—that wrongness—is still there, an itch she can’t scratch.

Ordinarily, Rena doesn’t have a problem with the concept of wrong. The existence of something that’s wrong means something else out there is right.

It’s not usually difficult to work out defining examples for both sides of the spectrum, either. General wrongness can easily be pared down to a single problem. Physical discomfort—because of a hole in a sock, or hunger, or exhaustion. Dismay—over a poor grade, a grating tone, the relentless crush of disappointment. Annoyance—because of someone else’s tardiness, or lack of spatial awareness, or because of Kieran.

Usually because of Kieran.

Today, the wrongness lives in her bones.

At the sight of her, Lucas pulls a sympathetic expression. “I take it that didn’t . . . go well.”

For a moment, she thinks he knows about Sahar. Then, with a horrible lurch, she remembers that she’d only gotten up to chase after Kieran. “That obvious?”

When she slumps into the seat next to him, Lucas sighs heavily and touches her knee. “You okay?”

And Rena doesn’t know, so she doesn’t answer. Carefully, she leans her head against his shoulder. She’d done a lot of that, in the beginning, back when the weight and warmth of him had been unfamiliar and welcoming. Reassuring.

Lucas takes her hand and raises it to his mouth. It’s hardly a kiss, more of a reminder than anything else, but it punches through something that had been impenetrable inside her, and raw sadness crashes through, a dam broken.

She closes her burning eyes and stays quiet for a long, long time.

When she opens them, Lucas lets go of her hand. Carefully, she watches him watching the family several rows over, something heavy in his gaze. He rubs his palm along his forehead, over the light dusting of freckles above his eyebrows that never really goes away, even in the dead of winter. Then, evidently aware of her gaze, the corner of his mouth tips up. “What?”

Lucas is normal. She can be normal too.

Leaning over, Rena touches her mouth to the tip of his nose, lightly, like she always does.

Lucas smiles, barely, and then tilts his head and kisses her properly.

Rena waits. His lips are warm, and familiar, and . . .

A crushing weight settles between her ribs. That familiar ache behind her belly button threatens to leak out into the rest of her, as it always does, as it had this morning. Ugly.

Miserable.

She almost wants to ask: Do you feel it too?

But what she’s waiting for, exactly, she doesn’t know.

She wonders, with a primal burst of masochistic indulgence, whether Sahar would know. She’d sure seemed to have all the answers. A pang of regret tears through her.

It’s not just that she’d responded so poorly. It’s not just that she’d spat out words she could never take back.