Page 37 of Blue Moon

“But I don’t know any of them.”

“I’ll introduce you.”

He glanced in the mirror in time to see Luna bite one side of her bottom lip. That was one of her tells—she did it whenever she was nervous or didn’t want to do something.

“You don’t like that idea?”

“What if they don’t like me?”

“Does that matter?”

A long pause, then a softer, “Maybe? These are your people.”

“Just be yourself.”

“Oh, sure, because people love me.”

“I mean the real you, not the girl who bitches about her manicure on BuzzHub.”

“You saw that post?”

Shit. Learn to keep your fuckin’ mouth shut, Metcalfe. “I wasn’t in a good place these past couple of months. On the worst nights, yeah… I looked for you.”

“I googled you once.”

“You did?”

“I saw an ad for a T-shirt, and it said ‘My dad told me I could grow up to be anything, so I became an asshole.’ I was going to send you a screenshot and ask what size you took.”

Ryder laughed out loud. “I take a forty-four-inch chest.”

“Well, I don’t want to buy it for you anymore, obviously.”

“You should. The only thing that’s changed is that now I’m your asshole.”

“That’s…that’s…” Her perfect little nose crinkled. “Kinda gross.”

“What, assholes? Everybody has one. And now you have two.”

Her turn to laugh. “I heard that some men like to…you know…stick it in there? Is that true? Jubilee told me,” she added, presumably in case Ryder thought she had sexual thoughts of her own.

“Some men. I’m not one of them. Not when there’s a wet pussy available.”

“Yeuch. Pussy. Why do men call it that?”

“Because ‘vagina’ sounds like it came out of a high school biology lesson? What would you call it?”

She shuddered. “I don’t know. I try not to think about it.”

“You really only had sex that one time?” he blurted, then cursed inwardly. What happened to being Mr. Sensitive?

“It felt as if I was being ripped in two,” Luna snapped. “Why would I ever want to repeat the experience?”

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

They needed to talk, talk properly, but Ryder couldn’t pull over because there was a jackass with a camera on a moped three cars back. Plus his instinct was to give Luna a hug—Neve had always asked for hugs—but his head told him that was the wrong thing to do. Even his therapist worried that he’d fallen for Luna as a substitute for Neve, but the two women were different. Very different; he was learning that with every passing day. Neve had craved closeness, comfort, but Luna pushed everyone away.

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