Page 102 of Impossible

I follow Joshua out. Right before I cross the threshold, I stop. “Thank you for inviting me.”

Hollis turns from the window. His eyes are cold.

Was he imagining me naked tonight? Was he picturing my body under his? Did he hear a word I said? I can’t imagine this stony exterior overtaken by lust.

It’s hard to believe he’s the same Hollis that smiled with pride over the dinner table earlier, or laughed as Risk decimated him at chess. All I see are tense shoulders and puffed chest and tight jaw andanger anger angermaking a giant impenetrable fog around him. But under it all… I shake my head. I am not big enough to allow this complexity in myself. I can’t even begin to imagine it in others.

Joshua asks before helping me into the passenger seat of the Escalade. His caution hurts more, juxtaposed with everything that’s happened.

“Are you ok?” he asks when we finally pull onto the road.

I don’t say anything.

“You didn’t know,” he says.

“I think I did.”

“You’re angry.”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.”

“We fought about whether to tell you or not.”

“I don’t know if I would have believed you if you had. I’m just—I’m afraid.”

“Of us?” He fails to disguise the hurt in his voice.

I bite my lip. “You were safe because you were off-limits. I could crush on you because I knew it would never happen. But if we’re fated mates… that’s not safe anymore.”

Joshua nods. His knuckles are white, his grip choking the wheel.

“I just don’t understand how you could respect me after my heat. After seeing me. How you couldlikeme.”

A muscle pulses in his jaw.

We’re silent for a while.

“We didn’t want to scare you,” Joshua whispers. “The medical heat was already difficult to take, but now…” he shakes his head. “There’s just notime.”

“I know.”

Joshua’s grip on the wheel tightens. I worry it will snap. His fingers are long and elegant, capable of drawing such beautiful music out of a piano. Clinging white-knuckled to the wheel like it might tether us to reality in the speeding car, forest blurring by.

“We don’t just want your heat, Indie,” Joshua murmurs. “We wantyou. Poetry and telling jokes and playing chess and commiserating over shitty families. The dinner table, the library, all of tonight—don’t tell me you didn’t feel it.”

I did feel it. The thought is nauseating now, too good, too intense.

“Can we not talk about it?” I choke. The anxiety is swelling in my gut, making my gorge rise and sweat bead at my temples. Joshua looks over. I know what he sees: gaunt, grey-faced Indie. Indie the Impossible.

He drives. I chew on his words. It wouldn’t be like that, after they saw me. It couldn’t. Once I’d been naked, useless and pliable in their arms. Had them all inside me, one after the other, taking turns. Been displayed, with every flaw in plain sight. I just can’t reconcile the two versions of myself I might be with him. With them.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers as we make the turn-off for the school. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

I maul my lip with my teeth. “I’m sorry your hormones stuck you with me.”

“I’m not.”

I look at my hands in my lap. My fingers are knobby, too stubby to be beautiful. My clothes are dirty and baggy and accentuate all the wrong things. My hair is stringy and thin and my skin is ashen and I’m too tired to even walk the length of a hallway, and this beautiful man next to me thinks he wants me.

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