Chapter 3
LAINEY
ONE YEAR POST-CRASH
Three taps sound on my window—Jensen’s cue that he’s waiting outside on the roof. A fourth knock rings against the glass, and my heart sinks. Four means that it’s an emergency, and when it comes to Jensen, it usually means he’s having an attack.
My walk turns to a run as I race toward the window. I hastily unlock it and throw it open. Jensen falls through the curtains the second he can, crashing into my bedroom, his breathing erratic.
I try to catch him and slow him down, but he collapses on top of me, taking both of us to the floor.
At the last moment possible, he throws his arms out, stopping himself from crushing me completely as his elbows lock into place, positioned on either side of my head. His lips part, and gradually, his breaths even out, caressing my cheek with warmth.
My stomach flutters, and I force the giddiness forming in my chest away—I try to at least.
The chain around his neck dangles between us, brushing my chin and sending tingles up my spine. Bending at the elbows, he lowers down an inch, but, God, it feels like a foot.
His proximity knocks the air from my lungs.
I know I shouldn’t feel anything toward him—he’s my best friend.
But the way his hair falls down between us, the way his bloodshot eyes soften with every second he looks at me, the way I can feel the most minuscule brush his thumb makes against the side of my ear—it has me questioning everything I’ve ever known.
Luca’s bedroom door squeaks down the hallway, and Jensen leaps off of me, shooting up and adjusting his shirt and joggers, doing everything he can to avoid my eye contact. I quickly stand up and fiddle with the window, pretending like that’s what I was doing the entire time.
I’m not sure why we’re acting so nervous; we weren’t even doing anything, but when Luca sneaks into my room and quietly shuts the door, I can hear my blood pumping in my ears, my heart rate higher than ever.
“Hey, guys,” my brother whispers, not wanting to wake our parents. “Movie?” he asks like that’s not the same thing we do every time Jensen comes over in the middle of the night.
“Yep,” Jensen says, and I can hear the subtle shakiness in his voice. “Scream?”
“Fuck yeah. A classic. I’ll get some snacks,” Luca says before tiptoeing out of my room.
He doesn’t need to pretend to be a ninja to avoid waking our parents. They are fast asleep downstairs, and regardless, it’s a Friday night; they wouldn’t be too upset to find Jensen in here. It wouldn’t be the first time, and I’m sure it wouldn’t be the last.
He’s never said the reason he comes over out loud, but his sporadic visits started last year after Carly’s funeral, after his parents found comfort in fighting rather than loving, especially when it comes to him.
Maybe my parents know more than they’re sharing—because I can tell when they “scold” us for letting Jensen crash with us, they’re not actually mad.
I’ve heard his parents fighting occasionally—from their home, across a twenty-foot yard, and through the walls of our house.
I wish they would grow up and realize that they hadn’t lost both of their kids in that accident and that the one who survived needs them more than ever.
But while they fail to be the support system he needs, we’ll fill the gap.
Besides, now, I wouldn’t know what a weekend looked like if Jensen wasn’t passed out in one of our rooms.
Luca leaves, taking the oxygen with him, the air suddenly taut in the room. I face the awkwardness head-on.
“Talk to me,” I mutter, my word ending abruptly as I turn around from the window and find Jensen not a foot away, facing me with a heaving chest.
“I missed you”—he pauses, and my heart leaps into my throat—“guys.”
There it is again—that wall that lives between us, which solidifies the more we lean into it. It grows stronger as we grow weaker, and nothing in the world is more aggravating.
I know it’s for the best—to not ruin what we have now—and I know he’s not in a good mental space. I don’t want him to regret us if we ever take that leap all because he was vulnerable and I was his safe space.
Carly was my best friend. She might have been a few years older than me, but that never felt like a factor in our friendship.
I’m scared that the intensity of our connection is amplified because of our shared grief.
What happens if a relationship is built on sorrow?
Is it doomed? How can someone ever know?
Jensen clears his throat, the rough and deep sound pooling in my core.
My eyes slide down the snug blue T-shirt drawn tightly across his chest, and out of the corner of my eye, I see his fingers twitch toward mine. The smallest, most minuscule movement, which has my lips parting and sucking in a sharp breath.
My voice is timid and soft, barely audible, as I murmur, “I missed you too.”
It hasn’t been decades or years since we saw one another. Not even months, weeks, or days. It’s been merely six hours since I passed him in the halls at school, yet here he is, confessing his longing anyway.
Gravity pulls us toward one another, our hearts calling out to the other like they were always meant to. Tipping my head back, I meet his eyes, finding his pupils dilated and a fire burning deep inside.
“Jensen, you’d better not be making a move on my sister.” Luca’s words cut through the tension, and I stumble a step back, feeling completely off-kilter.
A cold laughter rumbles out of Jensen to convey how humorous of a possibility making a move on me could be, and my eyes water automatically, embarrassingly.
“Relax. I was helping her get something out of her eye.”
At least I’m selling the part.
I know he’s just covering our moment up, lying to Luca so he doesn’t suspect anything between us. But I won’t deny that his laugh is echoing around my mind, haunting me like a ghost in a creaky old house.
We can’t have a moment like that again; it can’t ever go further than that. The three of us are best friends, and it needs to stay that way. If not for me, then for Jensen. He doesn’t need anything messy in his life right now, and I won’t be guilty for playing a part in the wreckage.
Wincing and blinking rapidly, I play up the act of having something in my eye. “Jensen sucks and couldn’t find anything. Luca, can you look?”
I step around Jensen and walk over to him, practically feeling Jensen’s smile and pride radiating at the back of my head for going the extra mile.
Luca tosses a box of candy to Jensen and drops the rest of the snacks onto my bed before turning back to me and grabbing my head like it’s not attached to the rest of my body, yanking me forward and opening my eye up with his thumb and pointer finger.
Well, I’m probably going to get something in my eye now from how rough and far he’s opening it. A damn car could park in there.
“Luca, Jesus. I’ll get it myself. You’re going to give me wrinkles,” I snap, pulling away from him and walking toward the door to head to the bathroom.
“You’re sixteen years old. You don’t have wrinkles,” he retorts.
“Yet,” I correct him. “But I will with the way you were ripping at my skin. And it’ll be one-sided, my right eye bag drooping lower than the left.”
“Come back. Let me do it again. That sounds hilarious!” Luca chuckles.
I flip him off as I step into the hallway and walk down to the first door on my left. I have to pee, too, so at least this won’t be a completely wasteful trip.
After using the bathroom, I wash my hands before resting them on the counter and staring into the mirror.
Get ahold of yourself, Lain.
My blue eyes are dilated, cheeks flushed, and my long blonde hair is tousled from the little stumble between Jensen and me. Grabbing my brush, I fix my hair and smooth it out while failing at pushing Jensen from my mind.
It doesn’t matter that I like him; I know it’s not the right time. I can feel reservations in the pit of my stomach, telling me to stop. But I don’t want to; rather, I need to be there for him right now in a platonic way. Maybe someday, things between us can change.
I head back to the room, finding Luca and Jensen have made themselves right at home. Jensen and Luca are on opposite sides of the bed with a Lainey-sized space between them.
This is going to be so much harder than I thought.
I crawl up into my spot from the bottom of the bed, lying on top of the covers while they both lie beneath them. But it’s doing little to give me a feeling of space from the brown-eyed, dark-haired six-foot heater of a human to my left.
The same one whose stare is digging into the side of my face while Luca starts the movie on my TV, positioned on the dresser across the room from us.
I swear … during the next hour and fifty-one minutes, Jensen’s gaze doesn’t leave me once. He doesn’t even blink.