Page 40 of Undone

“It took me fifteen minutes to get here after finding your ads around campus. Fifteen minutes of wondering whether or not some fucking weirdo showed up at your door.”

“I’m staring at one right now.”

A low, smoky chuckle pulls from my mouth. “You’re full of jokes today, huh.”

Her shoulders shrug. She’s so fucking small beneath me like this, enough that it feels like I’m towering over her, so I back off. A little slip of that early panic comes back.

“Do you understand how dangerous that was?” I bite my tongue, trying desperately to keep my voice low, even if the anger is ever present. “I mean, God, I fucking hate your dad, but I thought at least this wasn’t something I needed to worry about.”

“I’m not a kid,” she almost yells back. “I don’t need you to baby me like he does. So, just go. I can figure this out.”

Her voice is too loud, head tilted slightly to the side even as she speaks. It’s easy to spot that she’s not wearing her hearing aid, all her mannerisms I learned as a child and teenager are nearly the same. It’s like muscle memory to watch for them.

She darts toward the kitchen before spinning around to say, “Need me to show you the door?”

Lily doesn’t wait for me to respond, heading around the wall separating us.

I wait for a moment, flexing my wrists and considering her words.

Lily isn’t a kid. She might have moments of naivety but with how her father sheltered her through our childhoods, I’m surprised she’s not worse.

Like he does. The words settle in my stomach like rocks. I think I’d rather wear the usual labels most people slap on me than be compared in any way to Christopher LaBlanc. Especially by Lily.

Stepping slowly into the kitchen, I come around Lily’s left side and tap her shoulder lightly. She glances up, before looking down at her phone screen again.

“What?”

Clearing my throat, I take the seat at the table across from her, stretching my palms across the table to tap lightly.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

Her shoulders hike and she slumps lower in her chair. “It’s fine.”

“All right,” I reply. It was always that simple between us, especially with apologies and forgiveness. We never said what we didn’t mean, not to each other. “Well. I have an idea. Can I see your phone?”

Hesitating for a long moment, she finally seems to concede, setting her phone face up and scooting it with her knuckles to my grip. I take it, opening and finding one of her social apps. She’s got barely any social media presence, which I already knew from borderline stalking her in our first year apart. But she has the app, which is enough to locate the group for roommate searching.

“Here,” I say, typing a quick description into the post box. “Now, just take some photos on your phone and upload it. I think that will work better. And this is only students, so . . .”

“So no weirdos.”

“Yeah.” I smirk. “No weirdos.”

“Except you, I guess.” She’s trying to be cutting and mean, but Lily’s not like me. She can yell, her anger is easy to draw, but she doesn’t have a real mean bone in her body. “You’re a weirdo and a student.”

“The weirdest of them. Sure.”

There’s a moment where this feels like before. That same intoxicating feeling that there was no one else on Earth but the two of us. Toren and Lily versus the world.

But then, I watch it fade beneath memories and pain. Heavy weights pulling our shoulders down, down, down until I’m standing up and she’s back to her crouched, angry positioning.

“I should go.”

She nods, refusing to look at me. I see myself out.

Chapter 18

Lily