I tugged on my boots, her words squeezing in my chest impossibly tight. Plagued with this feeling that some other force was writing this story between us, and we would be helpless to change the plot, I crammed my toes in so hard, my foot stomped on the floor.
Propping my elbows on my knees, hunched over, her invisible pain so fucking palpable it washed over me and tried to mix with mine. “Your mother’s skates?”
“Yes.” Her voice turned soft, laced with an unexpected sound of longing.
I couldn’t leave her hanging like that alone as much as I wanted to. As much as I needed to get away from her, from whatever this was, or wanted to become. “I get that.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. I used to spend a lot of time here as a kid with my mother. At that same table over there.” I glanced over to the corner table, closed my eyes against the slice of pain, and turned back to her again.
“Where is she?” Mayhem swallowed. “Your mother.”
“She died.” I had to get out of here. I didn’t want this heart-to-heart. I didn’t want to give a shit. And I definitely didn’t want to bond over two dead mothers.
I stood, grabbed my skates, and turned away from her without a glance.
“You don’t have to leave.” Her words came out in a rush to my retreating back. Like she was desperate to hold on to something.
Only I was a bad bet and the worst possible anchor in any damn storm.
I stopped but didn’t turn around. “I think I do. It’s not a good idea.”
“I thought you said you weren’t the enemy?” she said quietly, my words coming back to haunt me, like everything else in my past. Just one more reminder why this had to stop now, before it went too far. Before I lost the iron fist on my willpower and gave in to the attraction, immersed myself in her, until it soothed my loneliness or worse.
Until she became someone I couldn’t walk away from.
I turned to look at her one more time over my shoulder then. “And you said we aren’t friends.”