He shakes his head like it’s hard for him to even talk to me. “It’s just shady. You keeping me in the dark like this.”

“I wasn’t sure if what I heard was what I heard. Plus, Taylor’s your friend. I didn’t want to come between—”

“We’re not friends, all right?” His eyes snap up to find mine. “We just used to know each other. That’s it.” He looks away again.

I swallow what he says, but it doesn’t go down easy, anger sour at the back of my throat. If they aren’t actually friends, then why was Taylor all over him the way she was, so comfortable and entitled? How well did they know each other, then? A million questions bubble at the tip of my tongue, but I don’t ask any of them. The moment doesn’t seem right, and I’m afraid my words will come out wrong. I don’t want a fight. Nate and I don’t fight much, and I don’t even know if this qualifies as fighting, but we don’t do this, whatever this is.

My eyes flick around the room as silence stretches between us. I glance down at my plate, but don’t touch anything.

A minute passes.

More nothing. We do that thing where we look around the restaurant and try to find something to focus our gazes on, then pretend something has caught our attention and that we’re not dying to reach for our phones and drift away.

I know I need to say more. I call his name, and Nate glances up from his plate. It’s the first time he’s given me real eye contact since we’ve sat down, and I feel like a small child, like I’ve been smacked on the wrist in front of the whole class. I sense the tremor in my voice before I speak, and so I swallow the words down and sip my water so I can try again. Normally, I’m not this sensitive, but with Nate it’s different. He knows what annoys me, what makes me tick, that I can’t stand the sound of gum popping or slurping or metal crashing into teeth. He knows about my irritable bowels and all the weird gurgling sounds my stomach makes hours after I eat anything and that sometimes my condition holds my colon hostage for weeks at a time. He knows how much I hate being ignored, that it’s tied to my abandonment issues. He knows my darkest fears, the pieces of me I try to hide from the rest of the world. So with him, I have no choice but to take it personally. He’s fully aware of what he’s doing; he wants me to hurt and maybe I deserve it, but it’s killing me.