“Okay,” I say, giving him a pass. He knows I’m not buying it—I can still feel the terror and caught-out feeling from him—but I can’t exactly throw stones about being observant. Maybe if I let him get away with this, he won’t notice my more observant moments.

“It’s just—well, I keep an eye on your friends sometimes,” he says eventually, and I can’t help my eyebrows raising at that. “No, not like, in a weird way. I just keep a lookout, you know? If I can see them coming, I can usually avoid them. And so I’ve … noticed stuff. You’re not like them. Or, at least—I mean, I don’t know you, so—I just mean that you don’t ever seem as into that crowd as everyone else.”

He’s babbling and fiddling with his watch—a massive, leather-banded thing wrapped around his bony wrist—as he talks. I can feel the impulse in him to get up and bolt, so I decide it’s probably time I let him off the hook.

“They’re not my friends,” I say. Why did I say that? Why do I keep opening my mouth to say something to this guy only to have something completely different come out?

“Bryce and Justin, I mean.” I keep going, because why the fuck not, I guess. “Yeah, I hang out with them and everything but you’re right, I guess. It’s not really my scene.”

Mouth, meet brain. Brain, meet mouth. You guys should get to know each other a little better.

Adam smiles a tiny bit as he picks his yogurt back up and I feel something uncoil inside of him. He likes being right. Though I could have guessed that from everything about him, it still gives me a warm feeling in my gut. And that’s when the random thought pops into my head of I want to make him smile again.

I’d been thinking of this lunch as sort of a charity case—therapy homework that would relieve some of my guilt about fucking things up last week. But as I’m sitting here, I realize that I want to impress Adam. That’s why I’m running my mouth about Bryce and why seeing his lips curl around a spoon feels like a victory. I’m not exactly sure where that impulse is coming from, but I want to chase it until Adam starts smiling more than he frowns.

“Do they bother you a lot?” I ask, because I guess we’re really getting to know each other now.

“Define ‘a lot,’” he snorts. Adam’s smirking now, in a way that I think could be described as “wry,” and it gives me that edge-of-cliff feeling again.

“You don’t seem that bothered by it.”