Page 57 of Embrace

“Are you okay?” Her smooth voice pours out of my speaker like a melody. Like honey dripping from a receiver. It soothes the ache, cools the burn engulfing my body.

My feet touch the floor as I sit on the edge of my bed and feel the breeze from the window hit my back. “I am now.”

She blows out an amused breath. “Any particular reason for the ‘You up?’ text to your tutor at two in the morning? I’m pretty confident you’re not studying right now.”

“Oh come on, that was not a ‘You up?’ text. I’ve never sent one of those.”

“Never? Missed opportunity, Ishida. You are the exact stereotype for one of those texts.”

I lean against my headboard with my phone against my ear. “Some of us are decent human beings.”

“Hey, I never said that makes you a bad person. What if I was waiting for a ‘You up?’ text?”

My heart beat quickens, and heat travels through me. Fuck, I’m sweating again.

“F-from me?” My voice comes out squeaky, almost prepubescent.Get it together, Kian.

She hums, the sound of it driving a chill up my spine. “Well, I can’t sleep, and the clips ofGetaway Islandweren’t helping.”

“Ah, so I was the convenient option. That’s fine, it doesn’t hurt my feelings or anything.”

She’s laughing again, and the sound of it is like a reward. “No, I think you’re the only option.”

There’s something about how she speaks to me that makes me feel important. It makes the light in my chest glow bright.

“Seriously, though, are you okay?” she yawns. “Or do you need a last-minute stats pep talk? Just remember: You are the t-test.”

I exhale a laugh, but the reminder of the late hour only pulls me back to my earlier thoughts, the ones that made me text her. I think it’s the result of hanging out with Aiden and Summer, seeing them together, the way they orbit each other.

The moment October comes, insomnia hits me like clockwork. I don’t know how my body catalogs time, but it’s like my circadian rhythm operates based on my heaviest memory.

“This month’s just hard,” I say, feeling like I unwrapped a wound too soon. “But Dr. Dunn’s going to be framing my test on his wall, don’t worry about that.”

“So cocky,” she mutters playfully. Then a silence stretches, and just as I’m going to fill it like always, Scarlett speaks. “Why is this a hard month?”

“My dad…” I second-guess the words. It’s weird bringing up your grief when all you wish you could do is shove it deep down. It’s the ultimate bummer, and I hate sitting through the practiced responses. The “sorry for your loss” and “I could never imagine” on repeat.

“Oh, shit. That fucking sucks,” she says.

I don’t hear Scarlett swear often, and now it almost makes me laugh.

Because it does. It fucking sucks.

When I tell people my dad’s dead, it makes something hollow appear in my chest. Because in a few minutes they’ll forget about it. He’s just someone’s dad to them. But he waseverythingto me.

How do I stop myself from reciting the never-ending essay of the kind of man he was? That he worked three jobs to get me to Dalton. That he sent me money every month so I could buy better gear when I’d grow out of it. He saw my dream, and he would do anything to make it come true.

“Sorry. Was that tone-deaf?” Scarlett’s panicked voice comes through again.

“No, no. I just wasn’t expecting it,” I say. “It does suck.” I squeezemy eyes shut, cringing at the fact that I’m keeping this girl up to listen to this depressing shit. “But we don’t have to talk about this. It’s not fun.”

“You don’t have to be fun all the time, Kian,” she says. “I don’t have too much firsthand experience, but I like to think of grief like glitter. Just when you think you got every piece and your hands are clean, you find some in your pockets, in the sole of your shoe, in that drawer where it seems impossible to even have gone. And it won’t just go away if you ignore it.”

Hearing her talk feels like putting together a puzzle, uncovering the picture of how she’s built me up in her eyes. I want every piece.

“It is kind of like that. Some days it’s like I’m forgetting—those days feel the worst in the end. I think tonight was one of those days. Then I start overthinking the what-ifs. What if we had caught his cancer earlier? What if they had moved here when I did? What if they had told me?”

Her voice comes back softer. “Can you actually imagine those what-ifs?”