I smiled, my lips curled over to blanket my teeth. “Like this. I’m like a shark with no teeth.”

“Shut up.” He moaned, his head swaying from side to side. “You are unbelievable. You sent me all these really deep texts, and now you’re joking about being a toothless shark while you’re professing your love? Really?”

I said it simply. “I love you, and I’m telling you, and I don’t have much more to expose, because what I have, I’ve already shown. The rest is self-preservation, in case you decide to walk out of here. I’ll crumble, but I’m really hoping that doesn’t happen.”

More because I really love basketball, and if you leave me, I’ll have to stop watching ball, and that’ll hurt too.

It’ll be like a second dumping all over again.

So please, please, please, don’t walk out and leave me behind.

Please don’t—

I looked up. He stepped closer, his head tilted to the right.

I eyed his hands. They were at his side.

I wanted them on me. Once he reached for me, he could make the world go away. All the hurt and sadness, all that was stripped away under his touch, but he didn’t lift them to me.

“The correct usage of crazy aside, you are a complete ball of psychosis at times.”

That’s what he said.

My chest filled with warmth.

He laughed, a self-deprecating edge to it. “Having said that, you were like an itch. I needed to scratch it, and the more I did, the more it grew until it took me over completely.”

He began to scratch at his chest idly. “It was on the outside at first, then on the inside. I felt like I was being tickled constantly. I liked it, but it was odd at the same time, and then suddenly one day, I found myself wondering about you. I wanted to know what you were doing, how you were. I mean, you were thirteen feet away in a ball cage, but I still had the thoughts. They just built and built, and you started to fucking take over. All my brother shit, that got pushed aside. You and basketball. That was what I thought about, and it was nice—a nice break from everything else. And somewhere along the line I began worrying about you, caring about you, doing things to make you feel better, to make sure you were okay. Then we started screwing and I thought, Okay, this will get her out of my system. It was the opposite. You started to consume me, and I hated it. I loathed it, but I couldn’t do anything about it. It’s like you decided to take over everything inside my body, move in, and be content to live with me for the rest of time, and I had no say about it.”