Page 55 of In Plain Sight

“Nope. Just me.”

“Shit!”

Luka’s strong hand closed over my arm, holding tight and stopping me from toppling over. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I thought you heard me come out,” he said apologetically.

“It’s fine,” I managed, my heart trying to bust out of my chest.

“You were really in the zone there.” He let go of my arm and looked me up and down, like he was making sure I was steady on my feet and not about to fall over. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

I pushed a lock of hair that had fallen over my eye back and tucked it behind my ear. “Yeah, I’m good. My fault for zoning out in public.”

The corner of his mouth tilted up in a shy smile. “You looked peaceful, like you were deep in meditation or something.”

I snort-laughed. “I wish. More like I was trying to get my brain to shut up.”

He leaned against the wall next to me, close enough that our arms brushed. Little zings of electricity danced on my skin at the featherlight touch. I did my best to ignore them.

“I know the feeling,” he said, his gaze fixed on a point in front of us.

We stood in silence for a few minutes, each of us staring ahead and thinking our own thoughts.

“Are you okay? Like in general?” he asked softly.

“Yeah.”

I could feel him looking at me, and I slid my gaze to his. He was studying me intently, his blue eyes curious.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “You can talk to me if there’s something going on. That’s what friends do, right?”

A flush moved over my chest and up my neck. It was validating that he thought of us as friends too. I swallowed down the urge to tell him I was fine.

Being the one people came to when they needed someone to listen meant I wasn’t good at talking about my own problems. The only people I talked to about personal things were Ivy, Mark, Dev, and Nate.

I didn’t like burdening people, and I’d learned long ago that a lot of people were happy to talk your ear off when they wanted support but were quick to disappear when you needed them to reciprocate.

It made reaching out to people hard, and it really hurt when people rejected me or minimized my struggles after I put so much time and effort into helping them. It made me feel invisible. And after a lifetime of having to bottle everything up and deal with everything alone, it was hard for me to open up and be vulnerable in front of people.

“My mother called me yesterday,” I said after a few beats of silence.

I couldn’t talk to him about my crush on him or my preoccupation with Sinbin, but maybe talking about my mother would help calm some of the mess in my head.

“You don’t get along?” he asked, shifting his gaze ahead of him.

“No.” I ran the tips of my fingers against the stone wall behind me, using the friction to ground myself. “She’s…difficult.”

“Difficult?” he prompted, his tone neutral.

I nodded. “She’s not a bad mom, but she’s not a good one either.”

Luka turned to look at me but didn’t say anything.

“I was an accident,” I explained. “She got pregnant with me when she was in college, and she blames me for having to drop out.”

“She blames you?”

I sighed. “Yeah. She blames me for a lot of things that have gone wrong in her life, including my father leaving.”

“What?” He gaped at me. “How old were you when he left?”

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