Page 80 of Love, Just In

I smile and chew my straw at him like a bloody psycho, briefly losing my courage as I consider making a run for it.

Zac’s startled gaze drops to the coaster he’s fingering. ‘We did.’

When the next thing to come out of his mouth is a jittery exhale, I jump in to save him—and myself—from the excruciating intermission we’ve been in for the past few days.

‘So, what are your thoughts about it?’ I ask, pleased with how mature I’m sounding; how I’m taking the reins. This is what we need to do. Just talk it out.

He stares at his drink for a long moment, and my stomach clenches with anticipation. When his gaze returns to mine, there’s a look in his eyes that makes my cheeks flush.

‘If you really want to know, Josie, in the past few weeks, I’ve spent what’s probably an unhealthy amountof time thinking about you. Every time I get a text, I hope it’s from you. Every time I get home, I want you to be there, and when you are, my heart starts racing. The reason I left in the middle of the night after the house fire was because I woke up next to you on the couch and wanted to kiss you so badly that I couldn’t see straight.’ His soft eyes graze over mine. ‘Every time you look at me, I feel like there’s no breath left in my body. It’s like you’ve completely filled my head, and there’s no room for anything else. And to be honest, I don’t know what to do about it.’ He lifts a shoulder, his expression caught somewhere between embarrassed and helpless.

I can’t find air in my lungs. I need to speak, but I can’t make any words, and my heart is punching my rib cage.

‘Zac, I …’

‘I know,’ he says. ‘This is heavy shit for us. Serious danger zone.’

‘I don’t want to ruin our friendship,’ I admit, although the humming deep inside my body that feels a lot like joy saysto hell with that.

My comment blows disappointment across his face, and I quickly cup my hand over his.

‘I’m not saying that I don’t want things to change,’ I clarify, thinking this out as I go. ‘But I’m so scared of losing you again. I only just got you back.’

He turns his hand in mine, and our fingers lace tightly together like we both need this. We shift to face each other and rest our shoulders against the couch, our gazes locking.

‘I feel like I’ve been blind,’ is all I can think to say.

He strokes the back of my hand with this thumb. ‘I don’t. To be honest, I’ve been looking for a really long time now.’

‘You have?’

His cheeks stain red. ‘When I just said I’d been thinking about you a lot for the past few weeks? That may have been a lie. It’s been going on for a lot longer than that.’

My breath snags in my throat as I wait for him to say more.

When he eventually speaks, his voice comes out thick. ‘I did choose you. Two days before the accident, Tara broke off our engagement.’

My lips fall open. ‘What?’

A guilty look floods his face. ‘I loved Tara. I did. But these feelings for you just crept up on me out of nowhere. Or, at least, they came back. I first noticed them a few months after Tara and I got engaged. You threw us that amazing Gatsby party, and you were sitting with one of her cousins, who had his hand on your leg. The thought of you going home with him gave me this really strong urge to kick his ass. Which I now know was stupid, because I never saw you with Amin again.’ Zac lets go of my hand and scrapes his fingers through his hair, sighing heavily. ‘But I don’t know; it just fucking woke something up in me that I couldn’t switch off after that. Sure, I liked you for a bit in high school, and there was always that undertone of possibility. But after I met Tara, I came to see you only as my best friend.Then, one day, you turned my head again, and I haven’t been able to look away from you ever since.’

I’m melting. And my mind is reaching for the memories of those days, but they’re mostly a blur.

‘You didn’t know I felt that way,’ Zac confirms, searching my face.

‘I had no idea,’ I reply, wondering how I could have missed this from someone I know so well.

He swallows tightly. ‘Well, it didn’t go unnoticed by Tara. She flat-out asked me one day if I had romantic feelings for you. And if she hadn’t put me on the spot like that, I might’ve thought through whether it was better just to lie and hope the feelings would go away. But I didn’t, and you can imagine how spectacularly unimpressed she was to hear the truth. So, she gave me an ultimatum: her or you. She said if I wanted to stay with her, I could never see you again.’

‘Jesus,’ I say quietly, even though I probably would’ve done the same thing had I been in Tara’s position.

‘And even though I thought about it,’ Zac adds, ‘I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t pick Tara over you. Because as much as I cared about her, the thought of losing you was unimaginable to me.’

A tear slips down my cheek as I grapple with the searing lightness his words have unleashed in my heart, matched only by the crippling guilt of knowing what came next for Tara.

Zac catches my tear with his knuckle. ‘I don’t want you to feel bad,’ he says softly. ‘I want this to be agood thing.’ His warm hands cup my cheeks, lifting my gaze to his. ‘I mean, when I picked you up at that train station after not seeing you for so long.’ Emotion crowds his features. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t see it written all over my face.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I breathe. ‘Why didn’t you tell me back then?’

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