Page 51 of Lighting the Lamp
“Sorry, my bad! You two, please carry on. Oh, my God?—”
He yanks the door shut behind him so hard the frame rattles. The air whooshes out of the room as if someone vacuum-sealed it with pure humiliation. Silence slams into place like a dropped curtain, and I don’t move because I’m still on top of Beau. His hand is still on my waist. His chest rises and falls beneath me, warm and solid and totally not helping me pull myself together.
My face feels like it’s on fire as I scramble off him like I’ve been electrocuted, rolling sideways onto the mattress and almost falling off the edge. My heart’s jackhammering. My hands fly to my face, covering my mouth with both hands, trying not to scream.
“He saw everything.”
Beau groans and flops back against the pillows, throwing an arm over his eyes. “That’s the secondhand embarrassment of the decade. I’m embarrassed for myself, for you, and hell for him, too. Nobody’s walking away from that with their dignity intact.”
I let out a strangled noise and bury my face in the nearest pillow. The scent of him clings to the fabric, warm and faintly citrusy, like soap and sleep and heat. I make a noise somewhere between a sob and a laugh.
“He saw us not kissing, technically,” Beau mutters under his breath. “So… silver lining?”
“I want to disappear.” I groan into the pillow.
From the other side of the door, Darius shouts, voice shrill with traumatized teenage energy. “Y’all decent now, or do I need to rinse my eyes out with bleach?”
Beau exhales dramatically. “Definitely not the morning I planned.”
A startled bubble of laughter bursts out of me, my head tipping back as air rushes in too fast. The ridiculousness of it allonly winds me tighter, until I’m shaking with the kind of helpless giggles that feel half hysterical, half relief. I mean, what else can you do when you nearly kiss the man who wrecks you in the best way and then get busted by a fifteen-year-old bearing muffins?
Absolutely fucking nothing.
Chapter Seventeen
Beau
Alise says nothing at first. She just sits perched on the edge of the bed like it’s the only thing keeping her upright. It’s as if she so much as shifts her weight wrong, she’ll shatter into pieces too jagged to put back together.
The shift is so sharp it nearly knocks the breath out of me. Not even five minutes ago, we were both laughing, red-faced and mortified, while Darius bolted from the room like he needed therapy. For a second, it felt like things might be fine. That we would keep being us, two best friends who happened to have kissed each other and wanted to see where that could lead. I thought maybe we’d turned a corner, that the crackling thing between us was finally out in the open.
But now, it’s like someone flipped a switch inside her. The laughter vanishes, wiped from her face and replaced with something brittle and sharp-edged. She locks herself away so fast I swear I can still feel the slam of the door reverberating in my chest.
Her spine is poker-straight, she draws her shoulders so high they nearly touch her ears, and she clenches her hands so tightly in her lap that I swear I can hear the pop of her knuckles from across the bed.
My eyes track the movement of her thumb worrying the hem of her sleeve with a repetitive, frantic precision that makes my chest ache just watching her. She doesn’t even look at me, eyes locked on the far wall. I wonder if she is trying to make the drywall disappear so she can escape the awkwardness that has settled between us. I mean, same, but we have to talk about this.
“Alise,” I say, but she doesn’t respond.
The only sign that she even hears me speak is the way the muscles in her jaw tick, her breathing coming through her nose in sharp, shallow breaths like she’s holding herself back from a full-body quake. I’m completely powerless. I can see her spiralling right in front of me, but there is nothing I can do to stop it. I’m watching someone I love drown in front of me while my arms are tied behind my back.
“Lisey,” I whisper, inching closer, the mattress shifting beneath my weight.
Hot, sharp pain lashes across my ribs, but I don’t care. I’d crawl through glass if it meant reaching her, but she doesn’t move. She doesn’t even blink at the sound of my voice, but her body changes.
It’s not something visible or anything someone who didn’t watch her like their life depended on it would’ve noticed, but I know her. I can feel the change deep in my gut. The way her spine goes ramrod straight. The way her breath stutters and her fingers curl tighter into the fabric of her sleeves. She’s bracing for whatever I want to say, and she expects it to hurt. And that wrecks me in a way I wasn’t ready for.
I bite down on the frustration boiling up inside me, trying to shove the rising panic back into the box I’ve barely managed to keep sealed since she first refused to meet my gaze. I want to reach for her, to take her hands in mine and make her look at me. Make her see me and remind her she knows I’d never hurt her, but I don’t. I refuse to be the reason she falls apart.
I shift upright with a rough groan, teeth clenched as pain slices through my side, but I force the words out anyway. “Lisey?—”
She flinches slightly, and I feel it deep inside me. It’s like something inside her recoiled at the sound of her own name on my lips. My stomach instantly drops. God, what did I do? What the hell did I do to make her look—well, actually not look—at me like that?
I hesitate for a moment, but then try again, softer this time. “We should talk about last night.”
That’s when she moves, my words triggering something inside her. Alise uncurls from the bed in one jerky, mechanical motion. Her arms wrap tight around her middle like she’s holding herself together by force. She crosses the room without a word, feet unsteady on the hardwood, and stops at the dresser, keeping her back to me. Her shoulders roll forward until she’s collapsing in on herself, and her head drops to her chest.
The silence that stretches between us is brutal, and when I can’t take it anymore, she finally speaks.
