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“Guess we were busy with other things. But I was always interested, you know.”
He hadn’t doubted it. Still, it was nice to have her ask these questions. Show an interest in his life.
Being just friends sucked, but maybe…
Maybe it was a gateway to being a hell of a lot more than they had been before.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“What’s got you smiling so much?”
Adam looked up from his phone, squinting against the sunlight at the face in silhouette above him. His grin shifted, becoming less the soft, private one he reserved for conversations with Jo and more the public one that everybody else got to see. Including his ex-girlfriend.
Fu
“Nothing much,” he lied. Looking down again, he finished typing out his reply and blanked the screen of his phone before tucking it in his pocket.
Dropping her bag, Sha
Sha
He’d only been back for a week and a half, and most of that had been spent settling into his apartment and getting ready for classes to start. Still, any normal semester, he would’ve seen her by now. He hadn’t exactly been avoiding her, but he hadn’t been seeking her out, either. Not the way he would’ve in the past.
He shrugged. “Been busy, I guess.”
“Busy with that girl you’re texting?”
He stretched his legs out in front of him and rested his arms on the back of the bench. “Who says it’s a girl?”
“Please.”
“What?”
“I know that look.” She stopped, and there was a sudden heaviness to the air.
She knew that look because he used to wear it around her. Because of her.
He cleared his throat. “Maybe it’s a girl,” he conceded.
The girl.
He’d thought that was true over the summer, when Jo had woken his body and heart, but now he was even more sure. Ever since she’d made that first overture and picked up the phone, they’d fallen into a routine of exchanging messages a few times a day and talking every couple of nights. They caught up on all the stuff they hadn’t gotten around to learning about each other in their time together. Sometimes they just talked. Normal stuff about their days and her research and his apartment mates. Stuff about life. Nothing felt real anymore until he’d viewed it through the lens of her perception, the sharp filter of her wit.
Sha
“Lucky guess.”
“Luck didn’t have anything to do with it.”
Adam raised his brows at that. “Excuse you?”
With a sad smile, she said, “You don’t exactly give up easy, you know.”
Right. Of course he didn’t.
He shook his head and shifted his gaze, a low grunt of a laugh scorching his throat. “So I hear.”
“Sounds like there’s a story there.”
“Not a very happy one.”
“Tell it to me anyway?”
For a long minute, Adam stared off into the distance, across the quad.
Then he turned to Sha
Amazing. As brilliant as the stars they studied, only—
Only she’d been a comet. Flaring into his life one minute and gone the next, never to return. Not in his lifetime.
He shook his head. “This is weird, right?”
“No weirder than it was this summer.”
Well, she had a point there. Only… “It gets weirder.” He dropped his gaze and his hand, leaning forward to brace his elbows on his spread knees. Jiggling his foot up and down. “Because she… she saw how things were. When you and I were drifting apart.” He glanced to Sha
He had to give Sha
Sighing, he let his shoulders fall. “At the end of the summer, I told her I wanted more. She said she didn’t.”
“She’s an idiot.”
“Says the last girl who broke my heart.”
She cast her gaze skyward. “I didn’t break your heart. Not the way this girl did.” Her smile went strained. “I didn’t have as much of it to break.”
“Sha
She waved him off. This still wasn’t about them. “Is that really what she told you? That she didn’t want more?”
“Not in so many words. It’s all circumstances, you know? We even said, maybe someday, if the stars aligned, you know?” He made vague hand gestures toward the sky before giving up. “But long distance sucks, and she just…” He worked his jaw fruitlessly. “She didn’t trust me.”
“Not to cheat?”
“What? No.” The closest he’d ever come to giving in to that temptation had been with Jo herself, and if he’d been able to resist her, he could resist anything.
“Okay. Because that’s totally not you.”
“It’s not.”
She’d known him better than that.
He took a deep breath, and said, “She didn’t trust me not to do the same thing to her I did to you.” His throat ached. “Hanging on too long. Settling.”
“And so now you’re settling again?”
He twitched his head up, twisting his neck to the side. “Wait. What?”
“You just said. She’s afraid you’re going to settle for her. But instead you’re sitting here, alone, looking at your phone like it’s the most precious thing in the world, settling for not her.”
“I—” Whatever protest he’d been about to make died in his lungs.
Jo wasn’t feeding him scraps of affection to string him along. If anything, she was withholding them to keep him at bay.
Never, not once, had she said she didn’t want him. Only that she thought she couldn’t keep him.
“Oh my God.” He scrubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Sitting up straighter, he dragged his palms down his face. “Oh shit.”
He’d let her push him away. Let them become just friends, not even daring to fight for fear of losing what little he had.
He was settling.
“Lightbulb,” Sha
He batted at her, moving to perch at the edge of the bench. “What am I going to do?”
“I don’t know.” With a knowing, fond expression, she darted in past his defenses and ruffled his hair. When he gave her an unimpressed look, she drew away. Slinging her bag over her shoulder, she stood. “But I’m guessing you’ll figure it out.”
Three days. There was no reason to panic, because it had only been three days.
Jo’s stomach turned over all the same. She flipped her phone so it sat facedown on her desk. The lack of a blinking light was too much of a distraction. Too much of a reminder.
Sure, she’d gone more than a week without talking to Adam right after they’d left Arecibo. But since then, the calls and texts had come more and more regularly. They’d been the best parts of her day. Perfect breaks from classes and studying and research.
And now she hadn’t heard a thing from him in three days. She rolled her eyes at herself, then kept her gaze trained skyward against the pressure behind her eyes. Okay, fine, after the second voice mail she’d left and the third unanswered text, he’d fired off a quick message letting her know he was fine, just busy, and he’d be in touch soon.