Page 6 of Bounced!

Wes?

The name went off in me like a flare.

Every part of me that had spent the last two years carefully not saying that name lit up at once.

My feet didn’t move.

My mouth had gone dry in a completely different way than it had all night.

He was here.

Wes was here, thirty feet away, wet and real and half turned. In the space of a single breath, my whole traitor body reorganized itself around one idea, which was to cross the room, put my hand on that shoulder, and have him turn and say my name the way only he ever said it, like it was the answer to something, like it was the answer to everything.

God, I wanted that . . . and I hated myself for it.

I actually took a step.

That’s the part I’m not proud of.

I took a step, because for one bright, stupid, weightless second, I wanted him so badly that I was willing to not care how, or why, or what it would mean. I was willing to walk straight into a ghost and pretend, just to feel known for the length of one night.

Then he shifted and started to turn.

My nerve whooshed out of me like a plug pulled from a drain.

Because I didn’t want to know.

If he turned and it was him, I’d have to survive it, right there, in nothing but a towel. And if he turned and it wasn’t Wes—my Wes—if it was some stranger with the wrong face and the right shoulders, he’d wonder why an enormous, graying man across a steamy room had gone the color of a bedsheet. I’d have to survive that instead, which was somehow worse, because it meant I’d become a man who saw a lost love in the back of every dark-haired stranger.

I didn’t want the answer.

Either answer.

I wanted, with an intensity that frightened me, to keep not knowing, to leave that door shut the way you leave shut a door to a room you’re afraid is empty.

So I did the only thing my legs would do.

I turned before he came all the way around, and I speed-walked back down the amber hallway, past all the open doors and their standing invitations, past the low sounds behind the closed ones, one hand clutching the stupid towel and the other pressed flat to my own sternum as though I could hold everything in my chest together from the outside.

I didn’t look back to see if he’d finished turning.

I didn’t look back to see if he was watching me go.

I didn’t look back, because looking back was the whole trap, and I’d fallen into enough of it for one night.

At my cubby, I got dressed like a felon fleeing a scene, which, emotionally, I was.

Pants helped.

Pants dampened the signal to my nether regions considerably.

Nothing dampened the other thing, the flare that hadn’t gone out, the name still ringing in my mind like a struck glass.

The kid at the front desk still had the pink hair, which made me think of Benji, which made me think of the bar, which made me think that in about nine hours, I’d be back there pretending I’d had a perfectly ordinary night.

“Leaving already?” he asked, not judging, just making conversation between bubble pops.

“The towel and I had creative differences,” I said, and was impressed my voice came out level.