Page 164 of Rules of Association

A sneaker clad toe nudged at the heels of my shoe. I peeked up to see Con looking down on me.

“Get up,” he said.

I threw an arm over my face, shielding my eyes and refusing him silently. I heard him sigh and I’m pretty sure that shifting noise was him taking a seat next to me. The feeling of his hand running over my head confirmed it.

“You’ve been such a sad sack lately. All irritated and on edge,” he said.

“I thought I was always irritated and on edge.”

“You wereirritatingandedgy. There’s a big difference. The other way was much more fun. This is just depressing.” Moving his hand to my shoulder, he shook me like a kid trying to wake up their friend from a nap to play. I wanted to laugh at the motion, but the urge was quickly swallowed by my mounting worries. “What happened to my carefree girl, huh?”

His girl. I snuggled into the warmth of that statement, even as I sighed. “She’s dead, Connor. All I ever do now is worry about what’ll happen if I don’t figure my life out before the end of the year. And deciding to donate to a money-grubbing scam organization is not helping my case.”

“It’s not your fault, Ceci. You didn’t know.”

“If it happens once, it’s an accident. I can accept that. But twice, Connor?” I shook my head. “What are the odds of that?”

Slow fingers snaked their way around my wrist and pulled my arm away from my eyes. Hazel brown with flecks of green assaulted me. His eyes held conviction as they met mine. That and a sort of pitying look that made me feel pathetic and stupid. “I’ll admit, it was unlucky. But not impossible.”

I groaned, my eyes closing as I banged my head backward against the concrete of the garage floor. I only got in two soft hits before a hand slid underneath to cushion the blow. I just laid there. Eyes closed, head in the hand of the one who could hold me together the most. Savoring it, because without him I was convinced I’d be falling apart.

“Remember when we met?” I asked after a quiet moment.

“Yeah,” he said cautiously, like it was a loaded question.

“What did you think of me, then?”

He scoffed, “When I first met you, I thought you were ridiculous.”

“No, not then,” I said, unable to help the smile that spread across my face when I thought of the wedding or even the funeral where the Ferguson’s and the Fernandez’s were all thrown together like this for the first time. There had been some growing pains between our two families for sure. But that wasn’t what I was talking about. “No, I mean when wereallymet. When we became friends. Remember that?”

His eyebrows pulled together. “Yeah, of course. Why?”

“What do you remember about it?”

He looked at me for a long time, as if trying to determine if I was serious. Then lowering my head to the ground carefully, he took his hand back before raising it to his neck, “Well… I was shocked when I found you in my sister’s bed. And when I saw your face all scraped up like that, I got a little worried—I found out quick how normal those were, though.”

I laughed and used my knee to knock into him gently. He smiled too, slipping one of his big hands over it and running his thumb absently along the inside seam of my leg. Sobering, he looked at me seriously again. His expression wasn’t readable. He was justlooking.

In a lower voice than you might think he added, “I remember thinking ‘holy shit. She’s actually like this all the time’.”

“Like what?” I asked, thinking for sure he was going to call me a‘little shit’or a‘pain in the ass’like he always did.

He didn’t.

Instead, he said something that warmed me from my toes to my head.

“Strong, fierce,crazy.” He smiled. “Loyal too. Once you decided you loved Tine, you’ve never looked back. Once you decide to love anyone you don’t look back. You take them and you protect them like your own… You also annoy them like you’re theirs too. You kind of don’t give anyone a choice.”

“For what?”

“But to love you, Ceci.”

My mouth decided to grin on its own. Nope. No permission from me. It just fell victim to the charms of this sweet man’s eyes and what I knew to be behind them.

“Trying to tell me you’re in love with me, Ferguson?” I joked.

“Every damn day, Fernandez,” he said, and you would think he was joking if it wasn’t for this look in his eye. I had seen it a few times, now more recently than ever. But I was able to pinpoint it now as the look he got before he kissed me that last time.

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