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I really don’t.

Am I trying to persuade myself?

“Jo, please…”

“It’s getting worse, Teddy. My darkness. Since Papa died, I have been so angry and I can’t stop.”

He took her hands in his, warmed them between his fingers. She closed her eyes and let herself lean on him—even though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t. He slowly led her to sit back down on the soft grass.

“You can be angry all you want. I’ll help you be angry,” he said. He sounded insane. He probably was.

“You won’t be able to stand it,” she said.

“I will. I am. I can.”

“I can’t make anyone happy right now,” Jo said, gently disentangling her hands and turning away. She heard a sharp intake of breath, as if she’d stabbed her best friend through the chest. “I can’t ask you to stay.”

“Of course you can.”

“I can’t! My darkness will be too much for you.”

“I love your darkness,” he said.

“Laurie, you liar. You don’t. Look at you, you are made of pure sunshine.”Or at least you used to be.

The darkness was spreading to him, too. Her darkness. She had barely seen him, and already it seemed that she had snuffed out the light in his eyes.

“Then I'll drown out your darkness,” he said.

She shivered at the word ‘drown’: it evoked the terrible fear that had gripped her the night of his proposal.

He sounded desperately earnest, as if he meant every word. Little did he know, he was already drowning in it, the fool. At the absurdity of his words, she made a sound that came out as a laugh. Well, nearly.

It was mostly a sob.

“How did this happen?” she asked. She wasn’t expecting an answer, just wondering out loud. “How is it possible that you… youfeellike this after growing up with me? After knowing me so well, for so long? How did you not grow up hating me?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught him nearly choke as the words ‘I love you’ sprang to his lips and he fought to bite them back.

“Because you saved me,” he said instead, and his eyes glittered. Were those tears? She couldn’t look. She turned her face away.

She wanted the earth to swallow her up.

“And now you’re killing me,” he added.

Jo’s breath caught in her throat.

Laurie drew himself up, visibly closing off his expression, shrouding himself in a cloak of ice again. He took her hand in his and kissed it lightly.

She shivered at the strange intimacy, the exaggerated reverence of the gesture. It should have felt silly, two people who had once been such good friends as they, standing there, her hand in his, his lips brushing her skin.

It didn’t.

It felt dangerous. Raw. Painful.

It hurt—not her skin, but something deep inside her, which was suddenly empty and aching. Something that could only be satisfied byhim.

No. No, I cannot feel this way.