Page 69

“I never said I was doing that.” I open the cupboard where the recycling bin resides now River doesn’t live here and need visual cues such things exist. “I didn’t see him for two years until he came here this summer.”

River frowns, watching me dispose of the balled-up foil from my breakfast. He’s confused, and I don’t blame him. We’ve never talked about my sexuality—there’s never been any need. But we have been friends a long time. Good friends. Maybe he’s wondering if he should’ve known something I didn’t know myself until Poet. “So, you’re…”

“I don’t know,” I confess. “I like him. And we are…close, sometimes. But I don’t know what any of it means.”

A weight seems to lift from my chest as understanding eases River’s bewilderment. “Does it matter what it means? If you’re having fun?”

“He invited Aras to pick fruit and meet the chickens he is picking up today.”

“So?”

“So, I don’t want Aras to get attached to someone who might not be in our lives for long.”

“I don’t think Poet’s going anywhere anytime soon. Farming doesn’t work like that.”

“That is not what I mean.”

“I know it isn’t.” River pushes his messy hair out of his face and gives me a look that usually traverses our friendship in the opposite direction. “But I don’t think Poet’s the type to ditch you or Aras if you decided not to bang or whatever anymore. Whitlocks aren’t wired that way.”

River doesn’t need to tell me that. I have been around Poet’s family enough to see who they are. But I also know Poet has never spent a whole night with anyone—because he told me when we woke up together this morning, an admission that has been following me all morning. Sticking like a fishbone, and I don’t know why. I am as confused as River was five minutes ago and it is a strange place to be.

Aras.

Hanna.

My friends.

I know these things. I understand them.

Poet feels like every weather front that has ever caught me off guard and I don’t know what to do with that. Or why it matters so much.

River has to go.

So do I.

We embrace and part ways, but he pauses before he roars away on his bike. “You know what I think?”

“Not yet.” He gives me a droll look before he sobers, and I sigh again. “Go on. Tell me what you think, my friend.”

“I think you’ve found something that’s yours.”

“Poet is not mine and I am not sure he would want to be.”

The words taste wrong and River is already shaking his head. “No, I mean that you’re thinking about someone just because you want to. And because they want you. When was the last time you did that?”

Truly, I can’t remember and River knows that. He knows me. And he is laughing as he jams his helmet on and rides away.

I am not laughing. I need to talk to Hanna before I see Aras with Poet—because I know how I will feel when I see them together, even if I cannot name it yet, and it has nothing to do with the inferno he unleashed in my body last night.

No.

It has everything to do with a man who works longer hours than the gods themselves and still notices I need him when I am asleep. A man who will teach my son bright and new things while I watch with addictive knots forming in my gut.

I do not do casual intimacy. I don’t want or need feelings beyond what exist for the people I already love.

Yet somehow I have wound up with both and I think, maybe, wherever this takes me, I am only at the start.

13 POET