Page 94 of Roommate's Guide to Love

Make sure you’re alone when using your battery-operated friend and moaning your roommate’s name.

26

quinn

I can’t sleep.

I’ve been home from the diner for hours now. It’s currently three in the morning, I already have a hangover, the house is eerily quiet, and all I can do is stare at the ceiling and think those what-ifs that have been plaguing my mind.

Specifically: What if I told Porter I didn’t want to go.

Or, the scarier thing, what if I told him I love him.

Because Maeve was right. I love him.

And I don’t want to go.

I want to stay here. In Rolling Hills. With him.

And while I know it’s what I want, doesn’t make it any less scary.

What if he doesn’t want this? What if he said he’d miss me because he’s a nice guy? Or that he’d miss me helping him with Grace? What if I’m misreading the looks and the glances? Or the little touches. What if the heat I still feel between us is just leftover from our eight years of situationship?

Fuck, I’m going to drive myself crazy. And I hate that the only way I’m going to know is that if I actually talk to him about it.

But that requires truths and realness and not making a joke out of something.

All things I don’t do well.

I sit up in my bed, wondering what he’d do if I just knocked on his door. No. I can’t do that. It’s the middle of the night. You can’t have life-altering conversations at three in the morning.

No, I’ll do it in the morning. Yes. That’s a good idea.

Which means that I’m going to now lay here all night and thinking of the worst-case scenarios, because that’s what I do.

No. I need a distraction. I need something to take my mind off of the fact that I’m actually going to lay my heart on the line with no idea how Porter is going to react. He could kiss me. He could sweep me off my feet, tell me he loves me too, and we could live happily ever after.

Or, he could let me down gently and tell me that he just wants to be friends. And oh yeah, by the way, you need to move out, because he has a handle on things and I just made our friendship awkward as hell.

God, I’m an idiot. Years of “protecting myself” now has me lying in a bed, my body and heart aching, hoping against hope that I haven’t screwed this all up.

Because I want him. All of him.

And that if he wants me too, I’ll stay here.

I’ll stay the night.

I’ll stay forever.

I’ll stay for the family we’ve become and the family who has supported me through thick and thin. I’ll stay and become the librarian at the school where I once stole the keys to the teachers’ lounge and distributed copies around the school.

But most importantly, I’ll stay for love.

Because I love Porter McCoy.

I think I’ve loved him for a while now.

The only question is, does he love me?

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