Never did more than kiss. Those words echo, then circle me, threaten to ensnare me.

I push my chair back and mutter “Excuse me.”

I leave the room and walk down the hall to the bathroom, clutching my stomach on the way. I feel like I’m going to throw up. My stomach churns and twists. I push open the door to the church bathroom and it’s freezing in here. It’s May so how can it be so cold? But it’s like they’re pumping ice into this bathroom. I jam my hand against the door of a stall, pushing so hard the metal smacks the inside wall. I shut the door and kneel down on the floor, pulling my hair back into a makeshift ponytail to protect it.

But nothing happens. Nothing ever happens. I never barf. I never wretch. I don’t even dry heave. I just feel sick to my stomach, so I come here, and I kneel, and I wait, as my gut tightens, like two hands are grabbing my insides, gripping them. I stay like this for a few minutes. Then I flush, flushing nothing. I stand up, leave the stall, go to the sink and wash my hands.

It’s quiet in here, so quiet. No one is talking, no one is telling stories, and I find the silence a relief. I think of Cam, of how being his made me forget the noise that had surrounded me. With every gig, I was erasing all those sounds I grew up overhearing, erasing the part I played at all those dinner parties, all those dates she set me up on.

So one note to Cam won’t hurt. It won’t set me back. I take out my phone and send off a note to Cam before I can even think about what I’m doing, before I can even contemplate.

Hi. Missing…

I stop typing the message. What am I missing? Him?

I return to the keys. I know what I’m missing. I know what I want. I want Trey.

Badly.

But I can’t have him.

Last night when he wrapped his arms around me by the subway entrance, when I ran my nose along his neck and inhaled him, when his hand brushed my back and I sighed like I wanted him again – that only reminds me now of how vulnerable I felt the one time with him so many months ago. We’re not together, and we can’t be, so how can I live with being vulnerable, with wanting, with feeling?

I don’t know how.

I don’t have a clue.

Love isn’t a quilt. Love isn’t patient, love isn’t kind. Love is a game, a chase, a thrill. Love is wild and war-like, and every man and woman must fight for themselves.

I can play the game.

I can control love.

I need to feel in control. I need to hold the world in the palm of my hands, my world, my life, and be the one who sets it in motion. The only one. I’m not controlled. I control.

I finish the message to Cam.

Hi. Missing things...

I hit send and return to the room. Joanne gives me a faint sympathetic smile. I don’t look at Danielle the rest of the meeting. I spend the time contemplating my fingernails and considering how to finish the next chapter for Miranda.

When the meeting ends, Joanne asks me to hang for a minute. I pour a cup of coffee from the coffee pot on the table as I wait. It tastes bitter and sludgy, but I drink it quickly while Joanne makes small talk with Danielle and Ainsley.

Then they’re gone and she turns to me.

“Hey, Layla. Everything okay?”

I nod several times. “Just peachy.”

Just peachy? Who says that? What is wrong with me? But I have to act like I mean it. Like I’m peppy and healthy. Otherwise she’ll know what I was up to. Sneaking off. Texting my drug.

She raises her eyebrow, noticing my weird word choice. “Danielle really bugged you, huh?”

“No. Not at all. Not one bit,” I say. If I lied to mother, to my flesh and blood, to the woman who raised me, I can lie to this lady.

“Layla, I just want to make sure you’re okay. I want you to get the help you need,” she says gently.

Can you rub out Miranda then? That’s what I really need.

“I am okay.”

“I’m here anytime you need me,” she says softly. Sweetly. Kindly. “If you don’t want to talk in front of the group, you can talk to me. I want you to know that.”

No one has ever offered to help me before. Talk to me. I don’t know what to say. “I have to go,” I say, then I take off.

Before I reach the top of the steps, I feel a buzzing in my back pocket. The possibility that it could be from Cam winds me up, like I’m a slot machine and someone is about to hit the jackpot and all my bells and buzzers are whirring. I grab my phone and my fingers feel slippery as I unlock the screen. Please let it be from him.

Please, please, please give me my fix.

It’s not Cam, though. It’s Trey. The other guy I want. The guy I can’t have.

I’m at the coffee shop around the corner. Guys meeting ended early. Come find me.

Part of me doesn’t want to go. Another part knows I’ll do what he asked – come find him. Because at least someone replied. At least someone wants me.

Cam. Trey. Trey. Cam. I feel like I’m seesawing back and forth, being pushed in one direction, then pulled in another by unseen hands. When I reach the shop, I spot Trey through the window. He gives me a curt wave – a guy wave – but his eyes light up.

I push on the door and quickly join him at the wooden counter.

“How was the girls’ only meeting? Tell me all the tawdry tales,” he says with narrowed eyes.

“Ha. It sucked. How’s that?”

He nods several times. “Know what you mean.”

He gestures to his friend Jordan behind the counter. “Can we get this woman a triple espresso?”

“Ten-four, man,” Jordan says, and turns the handle on the espresso machine. It hisses and whirs.

“How’d you know I’d want an espresso instead of a latte?”

“Because when you get stressed you need more caffeine,” Trey says as if the answer is obvious. But it melts me the tiniest bit that he remembers these details. That he keys in on my stress without worrying, or making it seem like a big deal. He just knows. He knows me. He’s the only person I’ve let know me. I wonder if we’d have become friends if we met under other circumstances. If we met first in group therapy would I have pushed him away? Or did meeting him at his shop, having him ink my shoulder, and then kissing and making out all night long – is that why I kept no secrets from him?

“That’s cute,” I say softly. “That you remember that about me.”

He raises an eyebrow. Tilts his head. “Did you think I turned stupid in the last hour? We’re friends, right? I should know these things.”

Okay, so that’s all. He remembers because we’re friends, not because we might be more.

I heave a sigh. I’m so out of sorts right now from Danielle’s story ripping up my heart, feeling all too familiar and all too foreign at once. I want to punch her mom and I want to run away from Danielle at the same time. I want to spill all my guts and secrets and lies to Joanne now that she’s invited me to lay them at her feet. I want to word-vomit everything I’ve kept inside me, every story I’m being forced to dig up for Miranda’s twisted mind-fuckery. But I want to shove all my secrets down and never let them out again too.

On top of that, I’m amped up from my own wait-wait-wait for Cam to reply. Maybe I don’t want him to reply anymore. Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t have a clue. Maybe I am still so fucked up. Maybe if Trey was more than a friend, I could get a grip. But it’s as if there’s something ticking inside me, harder, faster, and it hurts more. A sharp, metal object in my chest, struggling to break free.

Jordan finishes the espresso and places it in front of me. “For the lady,” he says with a sweet smile. Jordan is adorable. He has dark blond hair and blue eyes, and the four of us – Trey, Kristen, Jordan and I – are making plans to see the band Over The Edge on its tour after that text I sent Trey the other night. Jordan and Kristen would make a cute couple. Healthy, normal, not six degrees of fucked up. I reach into my purse for money when Trey gently brushes my hand away.

“I got it,” he says in a low voice and gives Jordan the money.

“Thanks,” Jordan says, and tends to another customer.

“You didn’t have to,” I say as I take a drink of espresso.

“Hey.”

“What?”

“What’s with you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t seem like yourself.” He lays his hand on mine, and like that, the tension inside of me starts to dissolve. His hand is safe and warm. When he touches me I feel like I belong to something true.

I take a breath, meet his eyes, and do the thing I didn’t do in the meeting. Share. “I don’t know. It was just a weird meeting. This gal talked and she said all this shit about how her mom wasn’t nice to her, and it bugged me.”

Trey furrows his eyebrows at me, but says nothing.

“What?” I ask pointedly.

“Did it bug you because your mom wasn’t always nice to you?”

I tense up again. “Why do you have to say that?”

“Because it’s the truth,” he says, not backing down.

“She was nice to me,” I mutter.

“Harley,” he says, and the tone in his voice is both caring, but also correcting. As if he knows I’ve made an error. “She wasn’t. She made everything she did seem okay.” He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, and I want to shrug him off, swat him away for saying crap about my mom. But I don’t want to lose his touch right now. I barely know this kind of contact, and I’m not ready to dismiss it. I want to explore it, so I inch – hell, maybe I even millimeter – closer to his fingertips that brush my earlobe, sending warmth sparking through me. I feel that strange, but wondrous thing I only feel with him as he touches me. A flurry of wishes and hopes race through me – him doing this as more than friends. Him doing this as the guy who wants to comfort me, who knows me, who can say the right things.

“She wasn’t always good to you, and I don’t like it when people aren’t good to you,” he says as he lets go of my hair, the strands falling against my clingy red shirt.

His words hurt, but they don’t sear. They hurt in the way the truth sometimes can. “Maybe she was too nice. Maybe that’s what you meant,” I manage to say.

“Yeah.”

“I guess it hit close to home what that lady said at the meeting,” I admit.

“I can imagine.”

I drink more of my espresso, finishing it quickly, then set the small cup on the counter.

I still feel edgy, antsy. I tap my fingers against the counter, beating out notes of my frustration.

“Hey. Let’s get out of here. Get away from people, okay?”

“Sure.”

Trey grabs his backpack, makes some kind of see you later gesture to Jordan, places a palm on my hip, and guides me to the back of the coffee shop, past the bathroom, then a tiny office. He opens the door to the office, shuts it, and unlocks a green screen door that opens into the smallest garden courtyard I’ve ever seen. Lined with red brick and planted flowers, this tiny garden area is wedged next to a vacant apartment building slated to be razed. There’s a stained glass window in the empty structure, and it makes such a beautiful piece of random found art.

A pink stained glass window in an abandoned building.

I look at Trey. “What is this little place?”

“Jordan said they’re going to open it up soon. Make it like a tiny outdoor area for the coffee shop. There’s room for a table or two.”

“Wow,” I say, and turn in a circle. On the other side, we are fenced in by tall wooden posts. Ivy skates down the wood. “I feel as if I’ve made my great escape.”

“Yeah.”

“Can we stay all night?” I joke.

“Maybe,” he says softly, and his voice sounds different. I don’t know what it is, but he seems vulnerable, like he’s about to say something.

“Maybe?”

He shrugs, drops his backpack to the ground, and leans against the wall. The night air is warm, and I can hear the sounds of traffic not far from us — horns honking, tires squealing, but then it fades in my ears as he lifts a hand, and it feels as if he might be reaching for me. I don’t know, I’m not sure, I don’t know how to read this moment, and how it’s shifted to possibility. Because I don’t know what happens when a girl likes a boy, and a boy likes a girl, and if that’s even what’s going on here. All my finely-tuned radar is off, it’s skittering, it’s pointing in every direction because everything is different when I’m not being paid for pleasure.

The world slows down as he touches my arm. The second he makes contact, his fingertips both electric and unbelievably soft and gentle on my skin, I know he senses that something has changed. Maybe he could tell I was at the end of my rope, was veering toward Cam. I close my eyes for the briefest of moments, delighting in how my arm is tingling. The sensations race through my body, and I want to be touched by him. I don’t have to feign interest, or fake a turned-on look.