Page 46 of Flash

His shoes scuff along the cement floor, and a second later, he presses his warm hand to the middle of my back.

“Deep, slow breaths,” he says, rubbing soothing circles.

I swallow down the urge to say something snarky back to him. I know how to breathe my way through a meltdown, thank you very much. But he’s just trying to help, and also, I don’t have the energy to be bitchy when I’m using it all to pick apart a hundred different moments with Arrow, looking for signs that it was all nothing more than a joke to him. That I was a joke to him.

My face burns hot and my throat tightens when I think about last night. I put my hands over my face and let out a stifled sound of embarrassment. I pry my hands off of my face and sit up slowly. Row already has a box of tissues at the ready, and I grab a few to start cleaning myself up.

“Fuck. The store.” I look helplessly towards the door, and he squeezes my shoulder.

“I locked the door and put up a sign that we’re out for lunch.”

“Thanks,” I murmur, then blow my nose. “Not that we’re probably going to be missing any customers anyway. They’re all too busy out in the parking lot, lining up to take pictures with the hot, shirtless goat dude.”

He chuckles. “Yeah, that prank kind of backfired. But they all have, so I’d say you and the tattoo guys are still tied.”

My chest squeezes. “He’s one of them.”

His bushy eyebrows furrow with momentary confusion, and then understanding and a flicker of guilt replaces it. My face burns hot again and my gut clenches.

“You knew?” I gasp. “You fucking knew?” I throw my wad of used tissues on the ground and move to stand up.

Rowan stops me with both hands on my shoulders though, pushing me back into the chair and stooping down to meet me at eye level like I’m some toddler throwing a tantrum. If I didn’t love my bestie so much, I might be tempted to kick him in the shins.

“Only since yesterday,” he says.

“Judas,” I hiss. “They’ve been over there laughing their asses off about me and you let me get blindsided? He was fucking me and then getting together with his asshole friends to describe my sex noises.”

“He wasn’t describing your sex noises to his friends,” Row says firmly.

“How do you know? I knew he was too nice. It was all an act to get me to let my guard down just so he could humiliate me.”

There’s a tiny, naive voice in the back of my head that thinks I’m being dramatic. It whispers that no one could fake the way Arrow looked at me last night, that there’s no way he lay awake until dawn telling me about his childhood just to pull some elaborate prank on me.

That voice has to be the last remnant of the trusting, starry-eyed version of myself that has been slowly stripped away by one bad relationship after another over the years. If this situation doesn’t stamp out that voice, I’m not sure anything will. But that doesn’t make it right, just stupid and romantic.

I clench my eyes closed and shake it off.

“He came in here before your date yesterday. That’s how I found out,” Row explains. “He had no clue you worked here.”

I scoff and grab another tissue to blow my nose with. “Or he’s just a really good actor.”

He flattens his lips and levels me with a look. “Come on, you don’t really believe that.”

“I don’t know what I believe,” I answer honestly. I did meet Arrow before this whole thing with the goblin twink started, and it does seem extreme that he would go to these lengths for a stupid feud over the Barbie soundtrack.

But on some level, it makes a lot more sense that this is all just some mean, fucked-up way to beat me at this dumb game rather than that Arrow is actually the great guy he seems to be and that he’s really falling for me.

I swallow around my dry throat and let out a deep sigh, my whole body weighed down by the exhaustion of another heartbreak and the aftereffects of a panic attack. Rowan stands back up and grabs a bottle of water from the stash we keep on a shelf in the back. He twists off the cap and hands it to me. I sip it slowly, the silence in the back of the shop ringing in my ears and my hands trembling.

“It was really cute, actually,” Rowan says, plopping down on the floor right in front of me and folding his arms on his knees. “He came up to the register to ask for my advice. He said he’d never gotten flowers for a guy before, but he didn’t want to be cliché and just get roses. He said he had a date with a special guy he wanted to impress.”

My heart lurches, but I roll my eyes and keep sipping my water.

“So you told him to get me the purple orchid?” I say. “It wasn’t a sign that he understood me on a deep level and somehow managed to pick out the exact right flower, it was just my best friend meddling.”

“A sign?” He scoffs at me this time. “Come on, Lew. Why does it always have to be some divine master plan? Some things just are. You should see how much you’ve been smiling since you started seeing him.”

“Good orgasms put me in a delightful mood, so I should brush off the fact that he might have been playing me and run right back into his arms?”

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