This was all becoming unbearable. All of this intimacy had been built between them. And it had... It had changed her. On a fundamental level. It had altered who she was, and how she felt about things. It had opened up the door to a piece of her she hadn’t known was there, and with it, she’d been flooded with all these new desires, hopes and dreams.

And now he was pulling away, and it was killing her. And there was only one thing she could think to do, one thing that had been tugging at her for at least a week now. And she’d been avoiding it. Avoiding it because she was afraid. Because she was afraid of being wrong, afraid of being hurt.

But she... She’d cried on Gabe. On her birthday.

And she’d let herself hurt for her mother. And she hadn’t worried much about whether or not she deserved it. She had just let herself have it.

And that Jamie—that Jamie who had found a way to crack open all that armor she spent a lifetime building—she thought that the risk might just be worth it. That no matter what happened...

That honesty with vulnerability was different than shoving your opinions out on everyone and insisting you were right.

She considered that honesty for years. But it wasn’t. It was layers and layers of steel with some true things placed over the top of it, but there was no softness for anyone else’s pain to land on. There was no crack so that their response could find any purchase inside her. Her version of honesty had been something that went in one direction.

“I wanted to help you,” she said softly.

“Why? I didn’t need it. There wasn’t any point.”

“There doesn’t have to be a point,” she said, looking up at him, dirty from the day, sweaty and clammy beneath her tank top. It was the worst possible time to be having this conversation, but she didn’t know what else to do. And she didn’t know when else to have it.

Because unless something changed, things weren’t going to get better. He was slipping further and further away from her. Like all of this intimacy that had happened had been an accident on his end, and now that he realized it he wanted to make sure that it stopped.

“I love you,” she said.

He looked at her, those electric-blue eyes gone hard. “What?”

“I love you. That’s the point. When you love somebody, you just want to be involved in their lives. And you know what? I haven’t let myself do that. I love my brothers, and there was still a wall between us. There’s been a wall between me and my friends, me and my father. All because... All because I couldn’t deal with the loss of that first love, that I wouldn’t even let myself grieve. It’s all self-protection, and it’s bullshit. It doesn’t protect you from anything. It just keeps you lonely. I don’t want to be lonely. I want to take care of you, and I want you to take care of me, because that’s how you love people. Because that’s how you find some closeness. That’s how you erase some of the loneliness that we all carry around in our souls. Believe me, I’m a champion at figuring out ways and reasons to not let people close. But I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t.”