“Of how I feel when I’m with you. Like I’m alive. For the first time. I don’t want you to think that you’re the reason why I up and left that night. When I came out to you, it’s because I … was starting to feel things for you, and I felt comfortable because, well, with you, I feel more like me than I ever have. But I have issues with … stuff.”

Okay, vague.

Also, same? Does he think I don’t have issues too?

His blue eyes stare me down. His grip loosens, then his hands travel to my sides, and suddenly I’m very aware of my body, the extra padding around my midsection, and I squirm a bit under the weight of his touch.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

I shake my head, but suddenly all I can hear is his comment from the day we met about me being thicker, my thighs filling out his shorts, the way I compared my fuller, curvier body to his, and now I’m fully aware that Jack is touching me deliberately. My mind goes blank, and my thoughts are replaced with what I think he must be thinking about me: Wow, Chase is bigger than I thought. Squishy. Nothing like my body. Insert vomit noise. I can’t do this.

I wriggle out from under him and turn away.

He comes up behind me, doesn’t touch me, but I feel him. “I won’t disappear again.”

“No, it’s not that,” I say, perhaps too quickly as I look down at myself and cover my stomach with my hands.

He must notice, because his arms snake around my body and rest on my hands. “You’re self-conscious. Why?”

Jack’s already disappeared once, so why not just lay it out all there, right? As these thoughts tumble dry on low in my head, I realize I have a shit ton to lose, but c’est la vie.

“What if I’m not … what you expected?”

“You’re not,” he says matter-of-factly. His mouth hovers above my ear, and he kisses the lobe. He presses into me from behind. “You’re more.”

“Stop,” I say, half because I might melt if he says stuff like that and half because maybe he’s just saying what he thinks I want to hear to make up for his disappearing act.

Then he lets go.

As predicted.

I brace myself for rejection, but instead, he slides around me and looks me right in the eyes. It’s so fucking intense that my knees buckle. He backs me up against the stone façade of the campus center.