“If you could only see yourself how I see you,” she said. She tugged on the arm he still held out at an angle, that she still held, like she’d slapped him a high five and then kept her hand there, holding his.

He dropped the arm, draping his arm over his face, eyes hidden in the crook of the elbow. “Likewise.”

An automatic response.

“No, I don’t think it’s likewise,” she said. “You’re smart, you’re good at so many things, you’re one of the nicest people I know, and one of the people who’s done the most to make the world a better place. You are so beautiful, you have so many people who would give their right arm to be with you—”

“No,” he said. “Listen, I know there’s a standard pep talk that comes with talking to other Case Fifty-Threes. I get it. We tell each other we’re beautiful in our own way, we lie and we say anything’s possible. And I—if I’m honest, I don’t really like it or buy into it, so I don’t say it, but I won’t say anything if someone else says it. But you don’t need to give me the patter.”

“It’s not patter. Weld—”

He pulled his hand away from where she held it, letting it fall alongside his body and leg.

“Weld,” she said, raising herself up and over him. Again, that trail of almost-hearts pumped within the curtain of tendrils. “Speaking as the girl who is sort of in your bed—”

She was going to regret saying that for the next fifty years.

He moved his arm away from his eyes. She almost lost the nerve to speak.

Almost, but somewhere inside her, some bizarre firework of images went off. All of Weld’s star power, the folder of images and promotional material she’d saved of him that she would never ever show him, and the very normal, very silly things like how he talked among friends, among old teammates, and how he talked to leaders and capes or community people he respected, how he talked to her, how he laughed at some shows and how he looked when he listened to the exact right piece of music and let the tension melt away…

How he looked right now, just a guy that was eighteen or nineteen with a whole community leaning on him, weary and lonely…

Letting that summation of a person hurt was far scarier than even losing this friendship.