Chapter 26
twenty-six
“Please don’t be mad at me.” Gina clutched the throw blanket up to her chin like it was some kind of emotional armor.
Her eyes were wide with unabashed glee, but I could see it—the subtle flicker of nerves behind her grin. She actually thought I might yell at her for once in her chaos-stirring, charmed life. I should. I wanted to.
I’d had the whole walk home to prepare an argument, line up all the reasons why tonight was a mistake. Why she was out of line, why I couldn’t handle this right now, why she should have never done this to me.
But instead, I just let out a breath and dropped my purse by the door of her bedroom.
“I’m not mad at you.”
“You’re not?” Her voice lifted with disbelief. “Really? Because after you left with him I had a good feeling that you totally were.”
I shook my head, watching her as she lit up with the thrill of being right.
“You’re not. You really aren’t! Oh my God, come here and sit down and tell me everything. How did it go? What did he say? You have to tell me if he said something swoony. He still seems like the hopeless romantic type that wrote you cheesy love poetry.”
I raised an eyebrow but let her tug me down to sit beside her on the bed and smooth part of her blanket over my lap. “Gina—”
“I heard rumors, okay?” she interrupted, eyes gleaming. “Like, actual, real-life gossip. That Brenden still talked about you. At alumni events. Like, wistful reminiscing. So, obviously, I did a little digging, and turns out, he wanted to see you. It felt … kind of fated, honestly.”
“A second-chance romance?” I asked dryly, plucking at the edge of the blanket.
She grinned. “Exactly. Like, no messy breakup. No cheating. Just dumb high-school timing. You two were sweet together.”
I didn’t get the chance to respond. The sound of the front door opening and closing downstairs pulled both our gazes toward the footsteps coming up the stairs. Slow, familiar. Josh.
“You didn’t answer me,” repeated Gina. “How was it. Was it good? Bad?”
“What was good?” his voice paused, catching us as he passed Gina’s doorway.
“None of your business,” Gina said quickly, chipper and unbothered. “Our darling Bri, however, just went on maybe her only good date out of almost a dozen with the one and only Brenden.”
My heart thudded.
“Because it was good, right?” Gina asked for the third time.
I felt Josh’s gaze hit me before I even looked up, and when I did, I almost wished I hadn’t. His eyes were already on me from where he stood halfway in the doorway, unreadable and impossibly steady.
“It was good,” I admitted, voice low.
Her entire face lit up. “It was?”
“Your high-school boyfriend, Brenden?” Josh asked, interrupting again. Quiet. Just curious enough to sound harmless.
I swallowed hard, but my throat ached. “Yeah. It was nice to see him again.”
There was a beat.
Josh nodded slowly. “Right. Of course.” He didn’t say anything else. Just turned and headed down the hall.
My eyes stayed on him until he disappeared.
“Niiight,” Gina called after him without a care in the world.
She waited just long enough to hear Josh’s bedroom door click shut before wriggling in place and turning toward me like a giddy kid at a sleepover. “Okay, now tell me everything that happened.”
But I didn’t say anything right away.
I didn’t know how to tell her the part of where I still had spent half the evening thinking about someone else. Someone who had walked away tonight with a dullness in his eyes ever since I had left him standing alone at the gallery.
Brenden was good. Safe. Easy.
“Bri?”
“It was good,” I said quickly again.
She cocked her head, giving me an odd smile. “Ok. Good. But I’m going to need more details.”
I waited, lying in Gina’s bed while she gently snored, until the rest of the house was still. I heard the telltale creak of the stairs and the hum of the dishwasher downstairs. I padded down the hall in my socks, holding my breath like it might somehow make this moment easier.
There, just like I’d known he would be—just like he was those years ago the last time I stayed with the Huttons for Christmas— sat Josh.
Alone in the living room. His legs stretched out, a book resting open in his lap, though his thumb had stopped turning pages.
His face was tilted toward the reading lamp, the soft amber glow catching the angles of his jaw and the faint crease between his brows.
“Hi,” I said quietly, taking a seat beside him on the couch.
His gaze flicked to me without turning his head. “Hey,” he said, then looked back down at the book.
After a pause, I reached out and gently took it from his hands, laying it on the coffee table as I sat down. “Josh, we need to talk.”
This time, he looked at me directly. His eyes were tired, guarded. A little sad.
“About what?”
“About earlier,” I said, tucking one leg under the other. “I know me seeing Brenden again probably wasn’t expected.”
He gave a slow nod. “It was a surprise, yes.”
“A surprise.” That was a good way to put it.
His jaw tightened even though his voice stayed maddeningly calm. “It’s not like we’re together, Brielle. You’ve said that pretty clearly. Several times. You don’t need to give me any kind of excuse if that is what you are worried about here.”
“I’m not giving you an excuse.”
“Then why are you down here?” he asked.
I… That’s not fair,” I said softly.
“Isn’t it?”
Silence fell between us like dust, thick and hard to shake. I felt him shift beside me, felt the way our shoulders accidentally brushed. At some point, I was watching his mouth again. God, I needed to stop doing that.
But Josh leaned in, just slightly, and my breath caught. He smelled like his eucalyptus bodywash again, something that made me think of that night on the couch and of everything we hadn’t said since.
I swayed toward him.
And then he pulled back.
“You know what? I know where this is going here,” he said suddenly, shaking his head.
“We’ve already had this conversation. A few times now.
I keep hoping you’ll say something different, but you don’t, and I can’t keep having you tell me that you’re not interested in something between us over and over again. I can’t do it. Don’t do it to me.”
“Josh—”
“No,” he cut in gently, almost like he didn’t want to hear himself say it. “It’s okay. You’ve been clear. I’m the one who wasn’t listening. I’m the one still getting jealous enough that you come down here wanting to fix things. That’s on me.”
“You didn’t—”
“I did.” He ran a hand through his hair, then rested his arms on his knees. “But it won’t be a problem much longer. I’m moving out in the new year, like I planned. We’ll just … clean-slate it. Pretend none of this ever happened.”
“You’re moving out.” My voice was barely a whisper.
“That was always the plan, Bri.” He didn’t say it harshly, just with finality. Like the kind of truth that’d been sitting in your chest for a while, waiting for permission to breathe.
It was true. He’d said it before. I just hadn’t really believed it until now. Or maybe I hadn’t wanted to.
“Just be happy now, Brielle.”
I looked at him, at the profile of the boy I used to sneak glances at in high school. The man he’d become since. “Are you?”
He exhaled a long breath that seemed to pull from somewhere deeper than his lungs. His voice, when it came, was quiet enough to make me ache.
“I want to be.”