“You’re not!” She reaches for me again, but I slide back up the wall and shove my hands in my pockets.

“I heard you guys.”

“She’s just freaking out like she does every time she gets stressed. It’s not even about us. She just put a new title on Kickstarter, and it way overfunded, and she’s going nuts about distribution channels and finding a new offset printer. That’s it. I promise. She always takes it out on everybody around her. Mom and I generally try to avoid her when she first launches for this exact reason.”

“I just don’t want to be the thing that stands between you and the rest of your life.”

“You give yourself way too much credit.”

I feel like I’ve stepped into some kind of a trap here, and I don’t know how to get out of it. Because the truth is, I think her life would be better, easier, if I left, that it’s the right thing to do—not just for her, but for her family and mine.

But I’m selfish.

“Seriously, Ridley,” she says, dusting off her backside as she stands up. “If you think I’d give up my dreams for a relationship, you’re out of your mind. I love you, but I love myself way more.”

And my jaw drops, and I kind of huff out a breath, because we’ve never said it out loud before. Never, but that’s what this is, isn’t it? Love?

My sister used to say all the time, “You can’t love anybody else until you love yourself,” and I believed that for a little while. It made everything seem so much bleaker and more hopeless, but then I met Peak, and the thing is . . . I love her. I do.

And it has nothing to do with me loving myself, because I don’t even know where to start with that. But she makes me want to be here, to kiss that spot behind her ear that makes her breath catch, to hear her laugh when I fall off my skateboard, to see the faces she makes when she’s lost in her music. She makes me see possibilities that I didn’t know existed. Like the capacity to love and be loved was not a thing that was on my radar before.

“What are you thinking about right now?” she asks.

“I’m thinking that you’re pretty fucking amazing.”

“It’s true.” She laughs, and the sound settles across my brain, calming me in ways even her endless facts never could.

“And that I love you too.”

She grins and kisses me, because we said it. We finally said it. I wish it was all we had to say. I wish the biggest obstacle was “I like you—do you like me back?” But.