Page 101 of A Brush with Love
Thu shrugged. “Alex likes football.”
“So?”
Thu turned to face Harper. “So, I like Alex. And that means I’m trying to like football. Because that’s what you do for the people you like—you accommodate them into your life.” She gave Harper a pointed look before turning back to the TV.
Harper blinked at her.
“You officially like Alex?”
Thu huffed out a laugh and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I think so. But that’s not the point.”
“I know,” Harper whispered, picking at the sticker on her beer bottle.
“The point is,” Thu said, turning to Harper again, “you can’t keep doing this to yourself. Living like this.”
Harper gave her a weak smile. “I know that too. And I’m trying.”
“But what are youactuallydoing to work on it, Harper?”
Harper didn’t have an answer for that, not one that would satisfy Thu anyway. Harper wasn’t sure how to explain that slowly she was rebuilding every wall she’d let crumble. Getting back to protecting herself in fortified isolation.
Harper could see the concern behind Thu’s eyes. Tendrils of warmth spread from Harper’s heart, but they magnified the pain, and she rubbed at her aching chest. Thu put her arm around Harper’s shoulders and gave a brief squeeze before turning back to the game.
“Is Dr. Ren letting you make up the exam?” Thu asked a few minutes later.
Harper nodded. A pulsing mix of sadness and anxiety was starting to move through her system. “She gave me an alternative assignment. Fifteen-page systematic review on invasive intervention in oral cancer.”
“Oh, so just some light reading.”
Harper gave a half-hearted laugh and took a swig of her beer, hoping Thu would bring up Dan.
Harper missed him in the sharpest way possible. It felt like her skin had been flayed open. Like she was exposed and bleeding out. She was angry at him for telling her secrets, for taking that ugly thing inside her and judging it, deciding she needed treatment for it.
But what made it worse was that, on a rational level, she knew she’d brought it on herself. She’d pushed him until he couldn’t come back. She’d broken her own damn heart so Dan couldn’t do it for her.
Because that’s what hearts did. They filled and swelled and pushed at their confines until they inevitably fractured into pieces with sharp, jagged edges that cut your fingers when you tried to put them back together. She’d worked too hard to allow one moment to set her off course like that.
Or so she thought.
She felt so directionless—so impossibly lost, it was hard to do anything but breathe.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what happened with Dan?” Harper eventually said.
She craved and dreaded the question. Part of her wanted to be forced to face what she’d done—have the words pulled from her so she could be free of them.
But Thu shook her head. “You’d tell me if you were ready to talk about it.”
Harper stared at Thu for a moment before nodding and snuggling into her side. Thu switched the channel and shifted to a comfortable position.
After a few minutes, Thu spoke again, her voice tinged with uncharacteristic caution. “You know what’s happening, though, right?”
Harper shifted to look at her friend. “Happening with what?”
Thu let out a long sigh, chewing on her bottom lip. “You haven’t heard from him at all?”
“He called me once but I didn’t answer. Why? What aren’t you telling me?”
Thu looked down at her hands, seeming to search endlessly for words. A trickle of dread snaked down Harper’s spine. Thu wasneverat a loss for words.
