Page 126 of Bring You Back

Fuck.

She meets my stare again, pointed.Your turn.She leaves with that, the water bottle cracking in her grip, and I don’t even have a right to be mad at her. I’ve forced her to deal with her shit, now she’s forcing me to deal with mine.

“What’s she talking about?” Reyna’s quick to ask, her tone impatient as I keep my stare on the empty space Camille left in her wake. “Julian?” The worry laced in my name makes me face her, face what I know I have to do now.

I just say it. “We should … stop.”

Stop?We technicallystoppedwhen I told her we should slow down. But I have nothing better. We’re not breaking up. We weren’t together, we didn’t have that conversation, and I don’t need to give her a reason to believe we were. Either way I spin it, I’m still going to come out of this feeling like an ass. I already do.

There’s a moment where she just holds my stare, unblinking, her glistening green eyes a shade darker behind wet lashes. That moment turns into two. Three. Four. The fridge hums in tune with my buzzing anxiety. Reyna’s a girl of many words, and I need them now.

“Just. . .” I move closer, hoping that closing some of the distance will spur a reaction,something. I can’t take her silence. Her eyes stay trained on my now vacated spot. “Say something,” I urge. “Yell at me.”

She scoffs a slight laugh, sniffs down at her portfolio. “Well, you finally said it.” She picks at the edges of her portfolio with one hand, the other clutched on the side, knuckles white. “You’ve stopped touching me.” The words are stiff, like she’s trying to hold them together, stop them from tumbling out all at once. She stops picking, both hands now clutched around that damn portfolio. “Kissing me,” she adds on an exhale.

I sigh, thinking this may actually go better than I think it will. There’s no yelling. No tears. Not any she’s letting me see. But then she shifts, looking up at me with narrowed brows, eyes wide and troubled as they move between mine. This is the Reyna I recognize.

I can’t let this get away from me, but she pushes, and it slips some more.

“So … where do we go from here?” She’s lost, searching my stare for the answers. The question strikes a nerve, and I can’t stop my next words.

“Don’t be so dramatic.” I say them through my own impatience, and I regret them as soon as they’re out of my mouth.

Reyna’s breathing has gone ragged, her lips parting on a slight gape, cheeks coloring red, her voice barely there as she says, “What?”

It’s a word her mother likes to throw around whenever Reyna complains that she’s not attentive enough, not there enough, warns her about the wine, the men.Stop with the dramatics.It guts her every time. We’re not supposed to say that shit. Of all the words Camille has used to describe her, even she’s steered clear of that one. What the fuck is wrong with me?

The whispers are back—two competing voices, one in each ear, both belonging to me. The asshole fighting with the good guy. The asshole is trying to give Reyna a reason to let me go. To make her feel like she’s not losing something. The good guy—the guy we all want me to be—is trying to do this in a way we can heal. But maybe that guy’s an asshole, too. Maybe there’s no erasing this part of me. No taking that title away.

Don’t lose her.

I open my mouth to amend the words, but it just closes. I can’t keep apologizing for me. Giving speeches for all of the things I’ve done wrong, telling her I’m saying shit I don’t mean. Not when we’re heading toward a fork in the road we never should’ve been on.

And I meant what I said. As much as that word affects her, I meant it. Wearefriends. Even if holding on to that friendship won’t be so easy this time. We have more of each other than we should. We can’t go back. Not immediately.

But I try to make the words get through, anyway. “We’re friends, Reyna.” I place all of my hope that we can still be into that word, urging her to see, to remember who I am, who I can be. See that I fucked up, that I’m human, and she can still let me make this right.

Her eyes darken, and I know that she’s not going to. I see every time I’ve fucked up flickering in that stare, a choice forming—too many times, she’s decided.

I’m out of chances. This isn’t different. This is the exception to her forgiveness.

“You don’t have sex with yourfriends,” she points out, stressing each word. “You don’t date yourfriends.”

My defenses are back up. “We weren’t—”

“Does this have anything to do with Camille?” she cuts in, saving me from jumping on the impulse of telling her we weren’t dating.Remindingher. She knows. She fuckingknows. “Is this about her?” I hear it in her voice now—the breaking as I’m silently begging for her to hold herself together.

Because I won’t be able to do it. I’m suddenly aware that I can’t end whatever this is with her, then immediately get with Camille. We might be able to heal from this, right here, but I don’t know how we’ll heal from that. She was already asking about Camille at the pier when all I had done was suggest we slow down. There really is no way out of this. Fuck me for trying to find one, but. . .

“This is about me,” I say, keeping the focus to right here. “It’s about us. We don’t work.” She slides away from me, away from this. My feet stay planted, but my hand moves toward her, my voice softer. “Reyna, you know we don’t.” We might if my feelings were different. More. But they’re not.

I say what should be obvious to her by now. “You deserve better.”

“I’m in love with you,” she says through a whisper, then shakes her head.

I flinch right as she meets my stare, my reaction causing her to flinch. She looks away again with another shake of her head, a sound escaping her mouth, like her body is trying to reject the words. Just as mine was.

I say nothing. She’ll figure out that she’s not.

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