Shouldn’t feel this much panic, or this much hunger, because a man had shown interest in her. The stakes shouldn’t be this high, this soon, based on this little, and the fact that it was Will made things even worse. She’d started relationships before, and while you could argue she’d done them wrong, they had been easy. But this would not be remotely easy. This was already terrifying, and if easy had ended up a nightmare, where would terrifying take her?

“Will,” she said, her voice a ghost in the cold air. “I … I can’t do this.”

The words thudded between them like birds shot from the sky. He took a breath, and his eyes slid shut. When he exhaled, his hand slipped away from her face, and he straightened, and suddenly there was space between them. Not a lot. But enough that he was no longer all that she could see.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and her voice cracked, for some reason, some terrible, embarrassing reason.

“It’s okay, Abbie,” he said quietly. For a moment, the expression on his face was enough to slice her heart into tiny pieces. Then he smiled, and that was even worse, because the smile was so fucking sad. “I’m sorry. I think I fluffed this up from start to finish, but—as long as we’re still friends?”

God. She very nearly almost collapsed to her knees. Somewhere in an alternate universe, some incredibly different version of herself was saying, “You will always be my friend, Will Reid, before you are anything else, because I have loved you for what feels like all my life, and when I loved you first, it was for the friendship you gave me.”

Abbie, unfortunately, wasn’t capable of saying shit like that. Fear of her own emotions tied her tongue and locked her jaw and made her flinch away, which was good and smart and safe—or at least it had always felt that way, until this very fucking moment.

“Of course,” she said, feeling as if she’d just ruined her own life somehow, sometime in the last five minutes. “Of course we’re still friends, Will.”

“Good,” he replied, and his smile was so beautiful and so honest, she could almost ignore the shadows in his eyes. “Alright then. We better hurry up with this shopping before we end up snowed in at a supermarket.”

She tried her best to laugh.

Will knew he’d royally fucked up somewhere down the line, because it was only 11:30 a.m. and he’d not only revealed his entire plan and been thoroughly rejected, he’d also made Abbie cry.