Page 94 of Just Friends

“Indian food?” Hazel asks, snapping me out of my thoughts.

I nod in quick succession before realizing that’s not how normal people behave. “Indian is good,” I say on an exhale.

Hazel watches me for a long moment, and I wonder what she sees. I wonder if she knows I’m falling apart, cracking at the seams. I thought I’d be able to handle waiting with more grace, but I feel like I’m onfirewith the need to touch her. Now that she knows how I feel, any last barrier I had of holding my feelings in check has been obliterated, and I’m left trying to piece myself back together until she gives me an answer.

“You want your usual?” she asks, dragging her eyes from mine and to the phone she’s pulled from her shorts pocket. She pulls up the restaurant’s online ordering feature, scrolling through the menu options.

“That’s fine,” I say, and it sounds hollow in my ears.

If Hazel notices, she doesn’t show it, dragging her finger across the screen and adding items to the cart.

Pushing up from my seat, I head for the kitchen. “Can I get you something to drink?”

I need something to do with my hands, even if it’s just chugging liquid until I piss myself.

“No, I’ll just take a sip of whatever you have,” Hazel says, and amusement cracks through the fog. A smile curls across my lips as I open the fridge and pull out two cans of Hazel’s favorite probiotic soda.

When I return to the living room and extend the can to Hazel, she looks from the soda to me, and her mouth twists into a grin. “Thanks,” she says and pops the can open.

I sit back down next to her, feeling lighter than I did before. I still want to find out how durable those tiny straps are, butthisfeels normal. Hazel and me on my couch, the setting sun slanting through the windows and casting my monochromatic living room in shades of color.

“Did you order the food?”

She nods, taking a sip of her soda. “Yeah, should be here in, like, thirty minutes.”

“We can start a movie,” I say, reaching for the remote on the coffee table.

“Or we could talk.”

The words hold weight that wasn’t there before, and it sends lightning crackling down my spine, lighting up my insides. When I let my gaze travel up the length of her to meet her eyes, they’re dark, like the very depths of the ocean. Blue fading into black.

“Okay,” I say, and it comes out like a whisper but deeper.

Hazel shifts on the couch, and when she tucks a sun-streaked strand of brown hair behind her ear, her hand is trembling. She lets out a breath slowly between pinched lips.

I want to reach for her, but I don’t know if it will be welcome, despite our hug in the hallway. I hate that I don’t know how to translate it, that what felt like a beginning to me could have been an ending for her—a goodbye.

“I talked to Sebastian,” she says, and my world narrows, my vision closing in tight. I don’t know what I expected her to say, but it wasn’tthat.

But despite it, I can’t help but feel a tug of pride in the middle of my chest. That had to be like facing demons for her, to talk to him when he so thoroughly wrecked her. She’s spent the last sixteen months piecing herself into something new and different. Somethingstronger, if not more scared.

Willing my heartbeat to calm, I ask, “How did it go?”

Hazel lifts her shoulder in a shrug. “About as well as could be expected, I guess. There’s no justifiable reason for what he did.”

“Then why did you talk to him?” I ask gently.

Her eyes dart away from me, fixing on some point on the floor. Her exhale is shaky. “I just needed to know if it was me.”

When her voice cracks, so does my heart.

My hand finds hers without thinking, trailing up the length of her forearm before sliding back down to link our fingers. She watches the movement, and her skin pebbles beneath my touch.

“It wasn’t you, Haze,” I say, trying to keep my voice soft but firm. I don’t know how to make herbelieveit, but I’m frantic to. “Ihatethat he made you feel like it was.”

My free hand slips beneath her hair, cupping her jaw. Her skin is so warm, and she’s so impossibly soft that my head swims.

Her eyes focus on me, and I can see the anguish there, the hurt that might never fully go away. But I also see something else, something I can’t quite name but that I desperately want to find out.

---