Page 15 of The Exit Strategy

He sucks in an audible breath that I ignore.

“She’s waging a war against me that I have no chance of winning, and she’s the one who got pregnant by my boyfriend. I guess it should tell you something when she was my only option for a friend.”

“She’s not.” He curses under his breath, and I sit up taller. “She’s not your only friend, Junie.”

My eyes burn with unshed anger.

“Fen—”

Fen. Right. Fenway’s my friend. Hudson is my friend.

Not him. Not Cole. Not anymore.

“Fenway’s the PR expert here,” he says. “He may not have anticipated how far Grace would take this, but he won’t make that mistake again. And those people online, they don’t know you, Junie. They saw a sixty second video of one of the worst moments of your life and decided they understood everything. They don’t.”

I force my gaze to meet his and stay there.

“Do you?” I ask. “Do you understand everything?”

So many stories play behind his eyes, but now there’s a wall there too. An arbitrary boundary he set to keep me out, and that hurts more than anything Grace has done.

“No, Junie. I don’t understand everything. But what I doknow is that you deserved better.” This time he’s the one to look away. “From them, and from me.”

It’s the only acknowledgment he’s ever given that he knows how much he hurt me by leaving the way he did. It also tells me that I may never get the answers I want about why.

“Where do I go from here?” Somehow, I’ve fallen back into the safety of our friendship, except this time, I don’t know who I am anymore and I’m afraid I’ll drown before I escape.

Because this version of me is the scared little girl who used to curl up on her front porch, begging someone to see her, but knowing deep down that everything she wanted would be ripped away eventually.

And maybe that’s the problem. He’s always been able to see me, and now I can’t protect myself without knowing who I can become.

“Fuck if I know, Junie.” He sighs, and some of the tension leaves his back and shoulders. “Why don’t we start with what we can do, huh?”

“Great. What’s that?” There’s my snark…of course she couldn’t stay away for long.

“Well, Viper…”

Warmth. It begins in my chest and spreads outward at an alarming rate. That nickname should not make me feel good.

“For starters, why don’t we work on being friends again, in real life, without social media?” He holds my gaze for a long moment. He used to be able to read all my expressions. Can he see the emptiness in me now?

“Friends, hmm?”

He nods, his lips ticking up on the right side, like he believes friendship is all he has to offer.

“Friends.” It’s not acceptance. It’s not forgiveness.

It’s not even a truce.

It’s just…something. Somewhere between spite and us.

We sit in the silence until the sky begins to lighten. We don’t get into my asshole ex or what the comments say. I don’t ask about his life or his equally shitty ex. We just…exist. In the same space. Breathing the same air.

I’m not even sure what I want from Cole anymore, but I do know him. He’s planning to fix me up, get me steady on my feet, then send me back to Boston—just another pit stop in his life.

And I can’t do that again.

My exit strategy has to be clean, efficient, set in stone so I don’t fall back into the easy comfort of what used to be.