Page 150 of The Storm

And ooh boy, does that scare the crap out of me. Him wanting to be friends? No. No, I don’t want that. I can’t do that. This would basically be him saying he’s over me. At least when he hates me there are feelings there. Being friends? We could never be friends. If love is friendship on fire, you can’t just put out the flames and call it good. It won’t be anything but a charred, burned mess.

“Blue?” he prompts.

“I have to get up really early.” I blurt out the first excuse I think of.

He nods.

I nod.

Civil.

We’re being civil.

“Yeah,” I say when he doesn’t say anything to that. “I’m just…”

I wave my thumb toward the door behind me and start to turn around.

“Rowing?” he asks.

Now my heart is hammering in my ears so loudly I can barely hear him.

“What?”

“Are you going rowing?” he asks. “Early morning, right? Like we—you used to.”

The transition from we to you is so smooth I’m not even sure it was really there. Maybe I was just imagining it. Doesn’t stop the memories from flooding in. Him and me, shells and kayaks. The bay.

All those early mornings we spent out there while the rest of the world was still asleep. The sunrises and sunsets. Just us and the water and the feeling that there were endless possibilities ahead of us.

I square my shoulders and lift my chin up while I breathe in, erasing the aftereffects of that march down the memory lane.

“I haven’t been in a while.”

He raises his brows and tilts his head to the side and looks rightintome, and who gave him the right?

I shrug.

“Don’t really have the time for things like that anymore. Look, I really have to go. I’ll see you around.”

I would like to say I leave, but this is a full-blown escape. Nothing more, nothing less.

FORTY-NINE

INDY

After tossingand turning for most of the night, I finally fall asleep a few hours before my alarm is supposed to go off, and then somehow, I manage to sleep in. And since my morning is already circling the drain, the T gets stuck between stations, so we sit in the tunnel for forty minutes, and it gets so stuffy that the whole thing ends in a lovely asthma attack.

By the time I make it to Callum’s I’m sweaty and in a terrible mood, and approximately one minor inconvenience away from lying down in the corner in fetal position because lack of sleep makes me dramatic as fuck, apparently.

The moment I step through his door, I find Callum waiting for me.

“I know.” I hold my hand up. “I know I’m late. I’m sorry. And I know I made a big deal out of you being late, so feel free to be smug about this.”

“Youdidgive me shit about that,” he says thoughtfully.

“If it helps, I feel bad about it now.”

“It does a little.”