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“We were best friends before. We were practically strangers after…”

“Exactly.” I finally turned to face him, and I could see the moment my words landed, the way his expression shifted from angry to hurt. From hurt to devastated. “We can go back to being strangers if being friends is too much for you…”

“Is that what you want, Dee?”

“We can’t have both. And I’m not...” I swallowed hard. “I’m not willing to lose you completely because I crossed another line I shouldn’t have crossed.”

Alvin stared at me, his jaw working like he was chewing on all the things he needed to say but couldn’t quite force out.

“So this is just...” he started.

“Fun,” I finished for him. “It’s just fun. For right now. That’s all it can be.”

He stood up slowly, still naked and vulnerable and so fucking beautiful it hurt to look at him, and I had to force myself to stay where I was instead of crossing the room and taking it all back. Instead of telling him that, yeah, maybe I wanted the impossible. Maybe I wanted to find a way to make this work beyond camp, beyond summer, beyond the only life I’d ever known.

But that wasn’t how the real world worked. That wasn’t how my world worked.

He pulled his pants on without looking at me, and the fact that he wasn’t arguing anymore somehow made everything feel… heavier. When he did finally glance in my direction, his ass propped against the exam table, his face had gone carefully neutral. Just like it had that day under the pavilion.

CHAPTER 31

The room had become breath and anger and skin and years of things neither of us was brave enough to say. And now, in the end, the infirmary looked slightly worse than I did. A container of cotton balls had somehow ended up on the floor and one cabinet hung open.

I sat on the edge of the examination table, staring at the tile between my shoes while I tried to remember how my lungs worked. Dee was standing a few feet away. Quiet as a mouse, of course.

I laughed under my breath at the sheer ridiculousness of it all, and he looked at me.

“What?” he asked, and I shook my head. “Alvy.”

“Stop saying my fucking name like that.”

He reached for a piece of gauze he’d picked up and placed on the counter. “You’re bleeding again.”

“Leave it.”

“Your lip⁠—”

“I said leave it.”

He stopped and I hopped down. My legs felt unreliable, which was insulting. Dee watched me hobble around like I was a newborn giraffe, his cum leaking out of me making it all the more humiliating.

“This is some fucking bullshit,” I grumbled.

He looked away and I laughed again. It sounded awful and broken and manic. He was gonna act like this didn’t happen. He was gonna mark it all down to being another “fun” little summer at camp and then we were supposed to go back to the way things were. Except worse. Because we both knew what they could be.

At first, I was angry. Then I was hurt. Now I was straight back to being angry again because that was easier.

“So that’s it? Camp ends and you just go home pretending that isn’t my shit on your dick?”

His head turned back. “What do you want me to say?”

There were approximately ten thousand answers to that question. I chose the worst one. “I don’t know.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “Fuck, we shouldn’t have done this...”

Hmmph. Typical Dee. Denial after orgasm.

I actually smiled. I should’ve known. “Sure.”