Sydney gave me a dramatic roll of her eyes, as if she’d been waiting for me to say exactly that. “God, you’re difficult,” she said, her voice dripping with playful frustration. “You could at least try to be a little more interesting.”

I let out a quiet breath, something almost close to a laugh.

“You’re a lot more complicated than you let on,” she added. “You’ve got that whole brooding, tortured math-genius thing going on. Big ‘I hate everyone’ energy.”

I snorted, but she wasn’t finished.

“But you’re also weirdly sweet in your own way. Like…you didn’t have to help me tonight, but you did.”

“I’m not sweet,” I told her, simply because I didn’t know how else to respond. The last thing I expected to hear about myself was being sweet. It felt like one of those words people used for people who were good at showing emotion, who were natural at making others feel cared for. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be nice. Helping her tonight had seemed like the right thing to do in the moment. Nothing more, nothing less.

“You are,” she insisted. “You just don’t want people to know it. Probably because you’re scared they’ll use it against you.”

That hit a little too close to home. I shifted uncomfortably. “You psychoanalyze all your friends like this?”

“I only do this with people I like,” she shot back with a smile.

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“I get it, though,” she said, her voice quieter now. “It’s easier to push people away. Easier to just…stop trying. Especially when it feels like they’ve already decided who you are.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

She propped herself up on one elbow, her face half-shadowed in the dim light of my room. “You need to loosen up, Blake.”

“I’m loose.”

“That’s the biggest lie I’ve ever heard.”

I sighed, shaking my head.

She tapped my chest lightly. “Seriously. Whatever’s going on in your head? Let it go. Just for a few hours.”

I stared at her. Let it go. Like it was that simple. Like I hadn’t spent every second of the last five months trying to do exactly that.

But maybe for one night… Maybe I could pretend.

So I let my body relax, just enough to let Sydney shift closer, enough to let her presence fill the space where Beverly used to be. I needed one night of forgetting. One night where my hands weren’t empty, where my chest didn’t feel like it was caving in, where I wasn’t waiting for someone who had already left.

“You know, I can go if you want. I won’t be offended.”

I should’ve said yes.

But the thought of being alone in this room felt like being locked inside a burning house.