Page 42 of Down My Chimney

“You do deserve better than me,” I said after a minute. It hurt, but it was true. “You really do.”

“I don’t want to,” Henry said. Tears glistened in his eyes, and they threatened to spill from mine too. “Don’t you get that? I wantyou. But I want all of you.”

My throat was thick, and I had to try twice to get the words out. “I’m just not ready.”

He nodded sadly. “I know.”

We looked at each other. Just stood there and looked. I wanted nothing more than to pull him into my arms and hold him. Wanted nothing more than to feel his arms aroundme. But I was too scared.

I was ruining this, and it was all my fault.

“What do we do?” I asked, my voice raw.

What if he said it was over? What if he said he didn’t want to see me anymore? What was my life without Henry in it?

“I don’t know.” Henry’s shoulders gave a hopeless shrug. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t want this to end.” I took a shuddering breath. “But I don’t—I don’t want to keep being unfair to you.”

A tear trickled down his cheek, and he wiped it away with a knuckle.

“I don’t want it to end either. But I don’t know if I can keep doing this. Not this way, you know?”

I nodded. “I know. I know, I—I get it. I do.”

“I think what you need right now is a friend,” Henry said, taking a deep breath. “Someone who’s not going to push you to do things you’re not ready to do. And I don’t think you’re wrong to need that.” He wiped away another tear. “But I think, if I’m going to be in a relationship, I need it to be a real one. One I don’t have to hide. And I don’t think those two things can co-exist.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“I guess it means we…try to be friends?”

My heart broke. This clearly wasn’t what he wanted, but he was offering it to me anyway. I truly didn’t deserve him.

I closed my eyes around the tears that began to fall. Fuck, I couldn’t keep it together. My chest felt hollowed out. Henry was offering to be my friend, but I still felt like I was losing him.

“We were friends once,” he said. When I opened my eyes, his smile was so sweet, I started crying in earnest. “I’m sure we can figure it out again.”

“We were friends until I became an asshole,” I reminded him.

“You didn’t become an asshole. We just…we grew apart for a while. Maybe we needed to do that, to become who we needed to be.”

“Does that mean we’re growing apart again now?” I asked, a sob ripping through my chest.

“It doesn’t have to,” he said. “But if you think about it, we did kind of skip over becoming friends again. We went from not talking tothis, pretty fast. Maybe we should have tried being friends again first.”

Henry was slipping through my fingers. No matter what he said, no matter how kind he was being, I was losing him. And I was about to be stuck in San Diego all summer, and then he was going to be in Europe in the fall, and I just wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

“Is that what you want?” I asked. My nose was running, and I wiped it with the back of my hand. I was a mess.

Henry’s face crumpled for a second, but then he forced it into a smile. “It’s what I can handle,” he said. “And I think it’s what’s best.”

“Do you really have to drive home?” I whispered.

“Just tell them I’m an idiot who doesn’t know anything about cars,” he said with a weak laugh. “Say I just needed to refill my gas tank.”

“You know what I mean. I don’t want you to leave yet.”

“But I can’t stay. I definitely can’t go back inside with you.”

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