Page 54 of Never Been Shipped

“I hate that you felt that way,” he said. “I mean, I know a lot of it is systemic shit that’s bigger than both of us, but I especially hate that Ryder ever made you feel that way. And I’m sorry if I didn’t see it, or if there were ways I contributed to it.”

She shook her head. “It was never you,” she said. “And some of it was Ryder, but a lot of it came from insideme. Like I allowed myself to feel those things. I’m angry with myself for that most of all.”

“I think,” John said, “that we should give ourselves permission to let all that shit go. All the things we wish we’d done differently. I feel a lot of tenderness for those kids back then who thought they knew everything but still had so much to figure out.”

She’d been watching where he’d been ministering to her hand, but now she looked up at him. “You do?”

He swallowed. “Yeah,” he said. “Don’t you?”

“I have a lot of regrets.”

“Such as?” Maybe naming them would take away their power somehow, would make them not loom so large in her mind.

“I shouldn’t have broken the band up the way I did,” she said. “I should’ve talked to you all, figured out a way to either go on or end things on good terms.”

He regretted the way that had gone down, too, wished he could’ve done something else to make her feel like she could’ve talked to him. He hated to think of her going through all that and feeling so alone.

“None of us were at our best then,” he said. “And I think we were all in survival mode. There was a lot that we missed.”

“I probably shouldn’t have done thatPlayboyspread,” she said. “At least, not in that way. It was very reactionary, and I wish I had done it for a different reason.”

He wanted to squeeze her hand, but he didn’t want to hurt her, so he settled for rubbing his thumb along her palm. He remembered what Frankie had said, about the timing of that interview being odd, and now he understood it so much better. She’d been spooked by Ryder’s threat, and she’d decided to get out ahead of it, to put out her own pictures that she had agency over before he could beat her to the punch. It was a savvy move, because it took most of the sting out of anything he could do to her. But it also meant he’d still had the opportunity to get to her, in a way.

“Were you happy with the pictures?” John asked. “Do you like how they came out?”

She seemed to think about that for a minute before she smiled, a private, sexy smirk at the corner of her mouth that made John’s heart speed up.

“Yeah,” she said. “I do like them. You really never saw them?”

He started to bite his lip before remembering that he had his own injury, and that move hurt. “I read the interview online,” he said. “But I didn’t think…I don’t know. It didn’t seem right to look at the pictures without your permission.”

“I mean, mydentistsaw them,” she said, “which I could’ve done without him bringing up while he had his hand in my mouth. They were public.”

“I know,” John said. “Still.”

It hadn’t seemed right, and it had seemeddangerous, to even allow himself to see Micah that way.

“I wanted you to see them,” Micah said. “You, specifically.”

Now his heart was going a mile a minute. “Yeah?”

“I thought about it a lot,” she said. “What you’d think of them. I even had—”

She laughed, cutting herself off, and he held his breath until he couldn’t take the suspense. “Had what?”

Her eyes cut to his, a little shy, before she looked back down at where their hands were still touching. “I had a fantasy that you’d try to get back in touch with me afterward,” she said. “Like maybe you’d see the A minor tattoo and it would be the perfect icebreaker to get you to talk to me again, when you finally saw what I’d gotten. I don’t know, it’s stupid.”

He could point out that communication went both ways, and that if she had been dying for him to reach out to her so badly,shecould’ve certainly texted him at any time. He’d never changed his number. But his last text to her had been sent only a few months before that interview had come out, sitting like a stone at the bottom of their long text chain.What the fuck, Micah?He could see how that wasn’t a message that exactly inspired a response.

Or when he’d shown up at her concert, a couple years after that, she could’ve allowed him backstage. But he’d also known there were other ways he could’ve gotten hold of her, if he’d been committed enough to try. How many times had he driven by her parents’ house when he was back in Ohio, thought about ringing the doorbell and just asking for her new number? They’d both made mistakes in that regard, and he really was feeling like it was time to let them go.

“I wish I had,” he said.

She rolled her eyes. “I should’ve known you’d be someone who’d readPlayboyfor the articles. Jesus, John.”

“I’m no saint.”

“Never thought you were,” she said. The way she looked at him, he knew she was remembering the night before just the way he was. She turned her hand over until she was holding one of the half-melted ice cubes, and she reached up to touch it gently to his bottom lip. “Does it hurt?”

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