Page 6 of Burn Bright
My stomach sinks, but then twists in more confusion. “You aren’t staying in New York?”
“Classes don’t start till next week. I’m not moving here before then.” He asks fast, “What about you? How long have you been here?”
“A few days. I have to take a week-long orientation for the Honors Program.”
“Overachiever,” he calls me out.
I make a heart with my hands and crack it apart. “You want half?”
He glances down at my hands, then up to my eyes. “You always break your heart for your friends?”
He would be my only friend.
If this were real.
“It’s imaginary, Ben,” I murmur. “Tomorrow, you’ll act like I never existed until our next strange encounter. Is that not what this is?” I motion between him and me.
“No.” He shakes his head, scans the bathroom, then rests a forearm on his bent knee. “No, it’s not, Harriet.” His voice is nearly a whisper, and he lays his gaze even gentler on me. “We don’t have to be strangers.”
I’m lost for words.
So he adds, “I want to be your friend.”
Did Cameron Dun-fuckface drop me on the pavement outside? Did I hit my head? “Okay.”
“Okay,” Ben repeats, then narrows his gaze. “I get the sense you still don’t believe me.”
“I’m trying, Friend.”
He smiles a little, which is coaxing mine out. Wow, he isreallygood at this…
I should probably take notes on how to make friends, but what he possesses feels like a gift. A trait inherited, not one learned.
“Thanks for the backup tonight,” I say too quietly. I’m unsure if he hears until I see the ire flashing through his eyes.
“Parties like this can be such a fucking wreck.” He gazes at the wall, his jaw muscle ticking. “I’m sorry that happened to you. Someone should’ve stopped it before me.”
“At least you did something at the cost of social suicide.”
“I’m a Cobalt. That cost is low.” He exhales a long, tired breath. “We’ve been here before.”Hereas in helping me.
He already said that over text.
I hold my knees, seeing him stare unblinkingly at a stain in the ugly brown paint. “Yeah, but it’ll be me helping you out next,” I promise. “Right place, right time, I’ll be there. And when I make commitments, I don’t usually break them.”
You can count on me,I think about adding, but how much weight does this cliché phrase even hold when you barely know someone and they barely know you?
Ben cradles my gaze for a steady beat, and just as he inhales like he’s about to tell me something, a knock pounds the door.
“Ben, you in there?!”
“Man, of course he’s in there. His bodyguard is standing right out here.”
“Ben, come do a shot with us!”
I rise to my feet first. “You’ve been summoned, Cobalt boy.”
He takes a taxingly long time to pick himself off the floor. He stares at the door, then down at me. I forgot about our height difference while we were on the ground. He istowering.I try not to imagine being scooped up in his arms.
