“As if that isn’t the vaguest fucking term ever,” Harrison grumbled.

“It’s more than he’s ever said before.” Lila reached out and tugged on his bun, which got his lips to quirk up as he turned to look at her. My tenseness softened a little at the sweet gesture. Harrison and I had been best friends for basically our entire lives and he’d never let anyone in the way he’d let Lila in. It still caught me by surprise seeing how comfortable the two of them were together. An added bonus was that Lila was basically the female version of me. We’d already been friends before she and Harrison got together. She was peppy and always down for something new. She got Harrison ever so slightly out of his shell, which was a huge bonus for me. I’d been trying to get the guy to loosen up since high school to no avail.

“I like her,” I admitted, tightening my grip on the steering wheel as we took another hairpin turn up the side of the mountain. “I mean, obviously we can’t be anything serious, but…”

My words trailed off—because but what? But maybe we could stay friends? But she’d had some profound effect on me and changed me forever? I was probably playing with fire here, but fuck it. I was ready to get burned.

Harrison shot me a disapproving look. “Shouldn’t we respect what she asked and not talk about this? She didn’t want to sleep in the same tent so you wouldn’t have to explain your relationship status, and here you are, spilling every detail ten seconds into this drive.”

I made eye contact with Lila in the rearview mirror, and we both smirked at each other.

“She’s just getting her first lesson in Ollie one-oh-one. That being that he can absolutely not keep his mouth shut,” she said.

Harrison sighed. “Fair.”

“Hey, I can keep my mouth shut when it matters.”

“Can you?” Harrison challenged.

“Definitely,” I insisted, although I hoped he didn’t come through with a plethora of examples proving me wrong.

Finally, after a beat of silence, he said, “I’m glad you met someone.”

My eyebrows shot up, shocked to hear quite possibly the most sentimental thing that had ever come out of my best friend. “As you can see, it’s not exactly straightforward,” I said.

He shrugged. “Still. You care. That’s a start.”

The words of the person who knew me better than anyone twisted inside my chest. If he could tell this was real, then there was no doubt that it was. Or at least it was real on my end. But fuck, what did that even mean? Likely nothing good, considering we were on a countdown toward ending and she was already pulling away from me.

If there was one thing about me, though, it was that I was going to take life by the balls and savor every moment. So if my gut was right and she was trying to pull away, I wasn’t about to let her do that without a fight.