Page 182 of Pucking Sweet

But so far nothing. Not even a casual handshake.

What heisdoing is saying he loves me a hundred times a day. He’ll ask me for the remote, I’ll hand it to him, and he’ll say, “Thanks. You know I love you, right?” I finished the last of the milk and put the carton back in the fridge (just to piss him off), and he just tossed it in the trash with an, “It’s fine. I still love you.” He crawls into my bed at night and turns off his lamp with an “I love you so fucking much.”

I’m gonna break. This is harassment, right?

Did I mention the pictures?

Yeah, I think one whole suitcase he brought over was just pictures of us. He blew them up from phone pics and slapped them in IKEA frames, staging them all over the house. He put a picture of Poppy and me right on my bedside table. It’s the two of us snapped from behind in her kitchen. He must have taken it when we were making granola. She looks so good in her little silky pink shorts, her blonde hair in a messy braid over her shoulder. She’s looking up at me like I hung the moon, and I’m laughing down at her like she’s the funniest goddamn person I know.

Yeah, seeing that picture was a punch right to the chest.

He hung more pictures in the hallway. There’s a large one of the two of us, an action shot from the ice a few weeks ago. The asshole even found some old pics from our Thunderbirds days. I was in a bleached hair phase. It was awful.

He put the framed yacht selfie of the three of us in Poppy’s library room near the cozy reading chair. Pictures from karaoke night—me on the stage, Poppy too. I opened my underwear drawer this morning and got a nice little jump scare. Our dick pic. He printed it out and framed it like a total fucking lunatic.

He can’t mean this, right? Or maybe he means it for now. But shitlike this can’t last. No one can ever be this happy. The other shoe always drops. People lose interest. They find another shiny object. They fade away.

Okay,mostpeople fade away. Apparently, Leos don’t.

I make my way down the hall to the bedroom to find Cole is already there. He’s sitting shirtless on the bed in a pair of shorts, eyes on his phone, one foot propped up on a bunch of pillows. His heart stuff means he sometimes deals with swelling in his ankles. Most nights, if he’s not icing his knees, he’s propping up his feet.

He was gone most of the night, having dinner with Poppy since we leave tomorrow for a quick away. Thinking of them together, laughing and happy without me, was a perfect kind of torture. Did they fuck? Does she miss me?

As if in answer to my question, Cole glances over his phone. “Poppy says hi.”

“She can say it her own damn self,” I mutter. “We still work together.” I step into the bathroom and flip on the light to brush my teeth.

“You could be living together,” he calls over the sound of the running water. “She could be sitting in that tub soaking in a salt bath right now. She could get out, towel off, and crawl between these sheets and fall asleep with your cock in her hand.”

I spit into the sink, putting my toothbrush away. “Don’t be a dick.”

“Don’t keep her waiting much longer.”

I go still, hands on the hem of my T-shirt. “She’s waiting for me?”

He rolls his eyes, focusing his attention back on his phone. “Yeah, ’cause she’s not the asshole I am. She still thinks you deserve space and time to process your feelings on your own. Childhood trauma is complex, Nov, and she respects that. But she’s ready to start being happy again. She wants to be happy withyou.”

My heart drops with my shirt to the floor. “She’s not happy?”

“Half her heart is missing,” he replies with a shrug. “Are you happy?”

I just sit on the bed, leaning back against my stack of pillows.

“Wanna hear something cool?” he says after a minute.

“Sure.”

We do this at night. We scroll on our phones and read out funny headlines and share cool animal facts. I’m expecting him to show mefootage of some deep-sea jellyfish. Instead, he plays an alien sound. It’s this weirdwomp-womp-wompheartbeat-sounding thing—

“Oh shit.” I glance his way. “Is that…”

He nods. “Yeah. That’s the heartbeat.”

We’re both quiet for a moment as we listen to it.

He shuts it off, a tense silence filling the empty space between us on the bed. “I’ve been trying really hard to keep it all together for Poppy, and just be there for her, and be excited…and be hopeful.” He turns to look at me, tears in his eyes. “But the truth is that I am so fucking scared, Nov.”

I take his hand. “What? Why?”

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