“I wanna know why you won’t stay,” he said, like the stubborn ass he was, and I knew I wasn’t going to get out of this.

He wanted it. The truth. And he wasn’t going to fucking let it go.

“I don’t want to,” I told him honestly, clenching my fist closed afterward when I felt that it was shaking a little. I had to lift my hand and brush the knuckle under my eye when it started to tickle, and I was more surprised to see it come back wet.

His frown got even bigger. “If it’s makin’ you tear up, I wanna know even more, darlin’.”

“I don’t want to lose you.”

“Lose me?” He looked stunned. “Now you’re assumin’ you’re gonna lose me? What the hell is goin’ on? We go from me askin’ you to lunch to you bein’ all closed off and then sayin’ you wanna move somewhere else even though I’m standin’ here tellin’ you to stay with me, and now you’re implyin’ you’re gonna lose me? What the hell happened? What am I missin’?”

How the hell had this gotten so out of control? I wanted to cry. I wanted to bury my head in the sand and pretend like none of this was happening, but that wasn’t going to be reality. “Look, I’m feeling overwhelmed, and I don’t mean to take it out on you. I just think it would be for the best, and I’m not going to change my mind.”

“Why?” he asked, his voice rough then. “You said you liked Houston. You said you like bein’ around me.”

“Oh my God, can you please just drop this? Can you please just say, ‘I totally understand, Peewee. I want you to do whatever will make you happy….’”

“I want you to be happy, kiddo,” he said with a tremendous frown that was eating me up by the second. “But I don’t get why that can’t be here.”

He was going to kill me. “Because you don’t need me here.”

“Who the hell said that?”

I was seconds away from crying. “No, you don’t.”

“Yes. I do,” he insisted. “You were snugglin’ on the couch with me the other day, and now you don’t even want to be in the same city.”

Lifting my hand, I rubbed my forehead, taking in his perplexed face. His confused eyes. And I had no idea what to do with them. “If you want someone to snuggle with, you’ve got a thousand girls in your contact list who would love to do it, Zac. If you want a best friend, you don’t need me here. You’ve done that with Boogie for the last fifteen years. If I live somewhere else, we’re not losing each other. I love you, and I know you love me too.”

His shoulders dropped, and something enormous moved over his face at the mention of Boogie. Something like exasperation or defeat. Or something I couldn’t understand. His gaze went to the ceiling, and he squeezed his eyes closed as he said, in a rough voice, “Of course I love you, kiddo.”

I was going to have to tell him. There was no way around it. Fear rose up in my chest, swift and steady, but he was never going to understand otherwise. And I was going to have to believe that we could get through just about anything together.

Including me and my dumbass feelings.

“That’s the problem, Zac. I know you do. I know that. But, I… I love you differently than that. In a way that isn’t… friendly. In a way that I have no business, okay? And I know that,” I told him softly. “Please don’t make me talk about this anymore. I lost you for ten years, and I don’t want to lose you for another ten again because I made things weird. You were Boogie’s first… and I get it. You and I were just meant to be friends. Best friends.”

All I could hear was his soft breathing in the moments after that.

He was watching me with this devastated expression that cracked me in half.

“Bianca,” he started to say softly with the heaviest blue eyes. “I love you, darlin’….”

I tipped my head back with a sigh.

“Can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished you weren’t Boogie’s cousin.”

He was flaying me alive now.

I wish you weren’t my best friend’s cousin, he’d said.

Maybe in another lifetime… those words felt like.

And in the story of our lives, in our friendship, his phone rang.

But he didn’t even look down at it. The “cousin” was perched on his lips. The I love you that sounded so right and natural, he had never needed to say the words out loud because I had known them so well. It was our silent song to each other. The one only each of us understood.

He wasn’t telling me something I didn’t know. Because I did.

It just wasn’t his fault that he loved me, but not… not like that.

It wasn’t either of our faults that we both loved Boogie so much either.

I understood everything.

“Get your phone, Zac. We’ll talk later,” I told him… lying. Knowing I was lying.

He said nothing.

“It might be important,” I warned him.

His chest expanded, and his expression was pained. “I need to go back soon for a meetin’.”

It was my turn to nod. “You need to focus. I know. I want you to.”

But those words weren’t enough because this man I loved just kept on staring at me, mouth slightly gaped with something in his eyes that looked like… something I couldn’t recognize. But finally he exhaled when his phone stopped ringing and then started up again, and his question was low and nearly hoarse, “We’ll talk later?”

I nodded, lying again. He’d forgive me, I knew. Eventually. But more than likely, it wouldn’t take that long because he wasn’t that kind of person.

But I was going to find out.

Because I was leaving.

It would be better that way. For both of us. I just knew it.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Peewee, are you going to tell us what’s going on or are we going to have to annoy it out of you?” my sister asked from across the kitchen as I pulled a tray of chocolate chip cookies out of the oven and set them on top of her range.

I’d made them per my nephew’s request. He’d asked all sneaky and extra sweet, by coming to lay on the bed with me that morning and pointing out a gray hair he’d found about three minutes into his visit. Then he’d made it up to me—in a way—by offering to pluck my eyebrows… then telling me I could trust him with tweezers because his mom was always asking him to pluck her upper lip. And sometimes her chin.

And here this heifer had been lying to me for years—bragging—about how she was “naturally” hairless.

Making Guillermo cookies was a no-brainer after that. That was going to be ammo I could use against her for the rest of my life. The lying cow.

Needless to say, that little tidbit of knowledge had been the highlight of my last two weeks. Under normal circumstances, I would have been full of glee at being able to pick on my sister. But apparently, I wasn’t being very good at hiding that something was bothering me, even though I’d tried my best to play it off.

Because no matter how hard I’d tried, Connie was calling me on my shit. One quick glance at Boogie told me he was in on it too, even though he’d only gotten to her house that morning. It was Richard’s birthday, and we were celebrating it over the weekend. It was mostly going to be a day and a half of doing two of the things he loved the most: going bowling today, and tomorrow we were driving to Houston to watch the White Oaks’ game against the Three Hundreds. Zac’s old team. I was still bitter toward them even so many years later for letting him go.