Page 36 of Like First Love, Again

Did it remind Mia of her own wedding day? Did it make her miss her estranged husband? Jealousy Tori couldn’t suppress fast enough twisted in her gut. She resisted thinking of Mia in a white dress and focused on the stupid show.

Her smartwatch buzzed with a text. On the small screen, the dark image was hard to see. As soon as she reached forher phone, her heart dropped out of her body and plummeted several stories to the ground below.

The photo of the night sky with the top of a mango tree creeping into the frame could only come from one place. Tori’s throat went dry and her pulse thrummed in her neck.

Come over.

Tori read Mia’s words over and over until they lost all meaning. Until her vision doubled. Everything in Tori wanted to reply with a single word.Why?

A parade ofwhysassaulted Tori and pushed to break from their nearly twenty-year-old cage.Why are you asking me to come over at ten o’clock at night? Why did you keep my jacket and the notes I passed you? Why do you know how to pull me back to you like it’s effortless?

Tori was so sure she shouldn’t go. That she was walking straight into heartbreak with her eyes wide open. That she’d worked so hard to recover from the exact pain she was apparently gagging to feel again. But she couldn’t pretend that she didn’t want to go. That she never grew tired of being with Mia. That, in truth, she never got enough.

Ugh. I am so fucked.

Standing, Tori yanked on the jeans she’d tossed over the couch earlier and asked herself only one question while she walked toward her keys.Why can’t I stop myself from coming when you call?

The answer was an ache in her chest, in the place where Mia had seared her brand into her skin so long ago. Where it still burned red hot, even if all it did was consume itself. An Ouroboros tattooed on her heart, perpetually trapped in its cycle of death and rebirth.

Laboring under Mia’s spell, or her own hopeless stupidity, Tori pulled up to Mia’s driveway. She’d never answered her text, she realized, as soon as she parked next to the old station wagon.

It seemed dumb to reply with anokay, and weird to give her a thumbs up. Instead, Tori walked around to the side gate. She strode into the narrow backyard and skirted the pool.

Wrapped in an artificial calm that bordered on numb, Tori was disconnected from herself as she walked to the pool house. The moment she looked up and saw Mia on the roof, her body betrayed her composure—heart racing and T-shirt sticking to her dampening skin.

“Are you coming up?” Mia’s voice was unusually small and fragile.

In the dark of the moonless night, Tori couldn’t see Mia’s face. Couldn’t read her expression for context. It only added to how disoriented Tori felt. How unmoored.

“Please?” Mia added before Tori could protest about how unwise it was to climb up an old ladder. To find her footing on a pitched roof in the dark.

Tori only noticed her hands were trembling when she reached for the first rung. Only realized her legs were weak when the ladder creaked under her weight. Only accepted she was more afraid of what Mia was going to say than she was of heights when her heart jack-hammered against her ribs.

As soon as she got to the top, tree branches reaching over the roof as if to help her the rest of the way, Mia’s hands appeared in the darkness. Eyes adjusting, Tori looked into her face and found the same expression that had drawn her in a thousand times before. The same gravitational pull that had always made resistance illusory.

“Did you bring me up here to flaunt your crime?” Tori asked with a tremor she wished she could conceal.

Mia looked down at her jacket. The one with Tori’s name and athletic achievements embroidered in the fabric. Mia’s eyes blazed even in the dark.

“It always looked so good on me,” she whispered, a smirk on her lips coming into full relief.

Taking Mia’s hands was muscle memory. Their fingers found each other like they had countless times before, and Tori’s body remembered everything her mind had desperately tried to forget. The way Mia’s touch sent a current up her arm and jolted her heart into racing. How she could make Tori feel like she was flying and falling at once.

Despite her unsteadiness, Tori transitioned onto the roof. She managed to get on her back without slipping off the terracotta tiles, tiles that were significantly more brutal on her body than they’d been when she was a teenager.

Just like the night before, Mia curled in at her side and Tori stopped thinking about physical peril. Scattered stars blinked down at them while Tori struggled to untangle dreams from reality. Wishes from facts.

Could Tori trust she was really there? She could easily have drifted to sleep on the couch. It made more sense that she was in a vivid dream or hallucinating in a damn coma than for Mia to be wrapped around her while the stars watched.

The stars had always been her witnesses. Ancient lights reaching across impossible distances just to illuminate this moment. Tori imagined them as Fates, bent over cosmic looms, weaving and unweaving destinies. How many countless lives had they watched unfold over billions of years? How many hearts had they seen crack open and heal and break again?

Tori couldn’t help but wonder if there was one particularly sadistic watcher in the sky. If she was standing over her cauldron or pyre or sacrifice and composing another break because the first hadn’t been enough.

Mia’s touch roused Tori out of her strange thoughts. Her fingertips traced the inside of Tori’s wrist and followed the small vein that curled around her knuckle. It was barely a graze,but everything with Mia was so amplified, the contact ripped through Tori like an earthquake splitting a continent in two.

Tori’s curiosity fell in the chasm Mia left in her wake. She couldn’t make her dry mouth form the question thrashing in her mind. Couldn’t make herself ask Mia what the hell they were doing there. She almost didn’t care what the answer was, she just needed to understand. Understand her own feelings and Mia’s motivations and how to name the impossible want that was dead-set on making Tori miserable.

“What are you thinking?” Mia asked softly, propping herself up on one elbow and looking down at Tori.

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