Here's the first rule everyone tells you: don't fall in love with your best friend. The second rule is probably not to say stupid things around him, either, stuff like romance is dead and love is inane—which isn't even true, Jesus—because he'll get that look on his face. You know the one. That split second, that pause, that discomfort that says he knows. Of course he knows. You used to be good at hiding what you feel. Somewhere along the way, you stopped being good at it.

And the thing about these rules is—they're simple. Basic. Grade school stuff. Don't admit things to someone who doesn't feel the same way. Don't do that to yourself. Don't do that to them. And yet—somehow—it's a rule you keep breaking. Over and over again, like smashing a water glass against the wall and watching it reform itself in your hand so you can throw it repeatedly, the smash, clatter, whisk of the pieces returning to wholeness.

There's a thrill to it, you think. And a misery, too. What a modern goddamn tragedy. All that high school drama you never had to deal with because you never opened your heart long enough to fall in love with anyone; here it is now, wrapped up for you in a bow, handed to you on a golden platter, here. Welcome to hell, Penderwick. Enjoy your stay.

...

You're crying. You can't breathe or see or think or feel anything but the weight of the metal in your hands, the hatred burning inside you like poison, like arsenic, like cyanide all the way down, down, down into the deepest parts of you: this suffering, unending desperation. Your father pulls you close to his chest and he's warm and sturdy and he loves you and you can't imagine why—you with this gun in your hand, you with this hatred in your heart, like bitter cough syrup on your tongue, gumming your mouth shut even as you try to sob and the sound breaks out of you against your will, an intruder within your own body. You are shaking, and the gun is going to slip out of your hands and onto the floor and everyone will see it and they'll know you're messed up just like they say you are, just like you're beginning to believe you are, and all you can do is bawl like a child as your sisters stare, their lips open. Fear and heartbreak written across their pretty faces. You wonder if they are tired of the self-loathing yet or if they still think you can overcome it through sheer force of will.

Everyone knows that you love him. Everyone knows that you kissed him, that you want to put your mouth on his, that he said it wouldn't work, that this is going to rip you up inside and that no one is going to stop the internal bleeding. Better to just let you hemorrhage out, purple-blue-black bruises beneath your skin, until you wake up one morning and the pain is gone, just like that, and only comes back when see him at night behind your eyelids. You're going thousands of miles away and you're never coming back here and you're never ever going to see him again.

Good, you think. I don't love you, but you do.

...

You go to a lot of different cities. You like them because the light pollution drowns out the stars, and stars only make you remember.

...

Jeffrey loves you; course he loves you. You love him, and he loves you back, and he just won't admit it to himself. That's what you tell yourself when you lie awake and think about the gnawing in your stomach, the way you notice all the motions of his hands, his eyes, because you're a cosmic joke and the whole universe is roaring. That's what you tell yourself. And you know it's not true. You've seen it in his face—saw it the first time you leaned in and kissed him without thinking about it, so overwhelmed by the closeness and laughter and proximity of his beautiful hands and the look on his face, like he couldn't stop staring at you, couldn't stop smiling, and you thought: I did that. You did that and you took it away just as fast when you leaned in and put your mouth on his because you didn't learn your lesson, still haven't. His mouth is flower petal soft because he's surprised and he's not moving because he's too busy not smiling anymore and falling dead-quiet and you're cleaving yourself to pieces inside, ripped up paper shredded like those absurd snowflakes you used to make and hang on your bedroom door when you still cared about such things. Like that would make you feel better, this fake paper crap. Like this is a good idea, this devastating thing that you've done, because he's never going to forgive you and he doesn't love you and you knew that, of course you knew, you knew.

"Skye," he says, shell-shocked, and you pull away and feel your heart slip into your mouth but you still know how to lie—you've always known how to lie.

"Numbskull," you say, quick, swift, "we're friends, Jeffrey, I'm sorry; you know I'm not like that."

And he smiles back at you, hesitant, and you punch him on the shoulder like old pals do—"Just wanted to see the look on your face if I did it, priceless"—and he widens his eyes in outrage and leaves, and you let him, because you still haven't learned your lesson.

The second time you kiss him, you have no idea what to say. Sorry for mouth-mauling you. Again. Sorry I can't stop looking at the shape of your mouth and the red of your lips and the skin of yours that tastes like tangerines. I know. I know. I lied.

He doesn't know what to say either. Just looks at you. He looks sad. Not mad at you even though he should be, has every right to be, when you kiss him without consent, think about him this way. He's not disgusted, either, afraid, or repulsed—

That makes one of us, you think, and smile, big and brave and as resilient as you can, because what else, at this point, is there for you to do?

"I don't—Skye," he says, a little helplessly, achingly; "I'm sorry, I'm not—I don't, not you," and you get it, you do.

It's not a mystery or anything. Sometimes you fall in love with your best friend and it sucks. Welcome to the party, Penderwick. Strap yourself in for the ride.

...

He stays up with you the whole night after you find out your dad died. His arms around you while you cry huge, silent, body-wracking sobs that drain the oxygen from you, the energy, the hatred and quiet dissolution you carry behind your ribs. He holds you and strokes your hair and tells you everything is going to be all right, and you nearly believe him. The last time you saw your father he was raking the dead leaves in the yard and you stopped and watched and thought he looked beautiful with the light of the sun running across his face, painting canyons on his skin, beautiful indeed. You weep.

You wake up before the moon has had time to set. Jeffrey is asleep, breathing even, quiet. Heis eyes closed and so close to yours. In this quiet moment, you don't feel. You don't feel grief. You don't feel fear, or pain, or that burning deep-seated hatred. You don't feel a thing. You just watch his face, study the geography of his cheekbones, and it warms you all through to your bones. Right now, in this moment, you don't have to be anyone. You don't have to think about everything that's going to go wrong. You can just lie here and close your lids and nothing will touch you like this. You can live in this moment, endlessly.

...

Pearson kisses you because of course Pearson kisses you; soon as he hears you boast about the trail of bleeding hearts you've left and the mouths you've claimed (you stupid fool) he shows up with that wry twist to his mouth, leans in too close and says a lot of dumb drivel and for some reason, you just let him keep saying it.

You're in the Quigley Woods where you and your sisters used to have pirate battles and your heart is pounding, which is—it's ridiculous as hell, right? It is. You feel sweary and too big for your skin and unlovable and not as focused as you should be, not even really focused at all. Pearson starts kissing you, and knows what he's doing, but he keeps making jokes too, and you can barely hear what he's saying with your bodies against each other like this but he makes you laugh and it catches you by surprise, stops in your throat, and he looks at you like he knows, which—damn him. Damn him.

He brings his hand to your jaw, a soft pressure. He says. "You know, you don't seem all that interested there, Blue Skye."

"Don't ever call me that," you say, vehemently, and kiss the corner of his mouth and push him up against a tree trunk when he doesn't respond.

"Fine," Pearson says, and he pulls you in tighter and you don't have the energy to argue, all the fight going out of you the way it always does in the end, leaving you void and hollow and tired, tired, tired. Then he says, "Hard to look at you. Too bright."

"Do you always talk this much?" you mutter, and he looks at you with burning eyes, still smiling.

"You inspire me."

"Shut the hell up," you say, and then, because you want to hurt him, because it's the only ammunition you have: "Aren't you in love with Anna?"

"Is that what you think?" He stops. "Aren't you in love with that Tifton guy?"

You twist, breathless. Goddammit. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure," Pearson says. He's good at this; good at ignoring your venom, your lies. Keeps moving. "Can we not talk about the people we're in love with while I'm kissing you? It's kind of killing the mood."

"What mood," you ask, but your breath is coming in gasps now, and Pearson grins like he's won, like he has returned from battle with his enemy's skull impaled on a stick, and you think, fine, whatever, you win, take it, and rip yourself away, your body shaking like a goddamn tectonic vibration, rupturing the topography of your soul.

Pearson gets his breath back and watches you tremble. The look on his face is undecipherable. "Well, thanks for that," he says, "really, it was nice," and he walks off and you follow at your own pace, ignoring the darkening sky.

...

Depression takes everything from you. It is a viper with poison fangs and its teeth are always sinking deeper into your skin and there's nothing you can do. There are so many things in your past that bear the word almost. Your mother. Then your father. The visions you had of being stupidly free and running through fields with stardust falling like pollen, the hopes you had of being happy. You and him.

What you do to combat it is simple. You've done it before. I don't—Skye. I'm sorry, I'm not—I don't, not you. Cut up the pieces of everything you feel, organize them into neat little rows, examine them like a cadaver on the autopsy table. Yes, how interesting. Yes, look here, at the malignant tumor that killed you. Now sweep it off the table into the garbage can next to you. Put the lid on it. Easy as that. Visualization and all that psychotherapy junk. Visualize yourself not being in love anymore. Visualize it hard enough and it will just end, like cutting out the part of you that's bad, that's sick, that's wrong, and sweeping it into the trash and watching it plummet, bloodied and terrible, grotesque. Goodbye, you think, insensibly, without reason; goodbye. You don't feel it anymore. You don't feel anything. This is what you're good at, in the end: shutting down the parts of you that hurt, and letting your whole brain go dark.

And kissing the wrong people, and screwing yourself over. You're good at that too.

...

It's been five years since you've seen him. He comes through the door and sees you and drops his bags. You're both laughing and crying, too, and it's really ugly and no one's keeping track of whose hands are where, whose arms are wrapped around who.

When it's over, you wipes your eyes and make him sit down and eat for godsakes, and so he does, wrapped in a spare blanket, mouth full of empanadas with color remembering his face at last.

"It's good to see you," he says, and you nod hard.

He was always luminous, but today he looks almost incandescent. Your fingers tremble around the stem of your glass.

...

It takes you a while to get used to him again. You'd forgotten the infinity of expressions he's capable of making and the glimmer behind his eyes. There are the beginnings of a few fine lines digging into his face, but that's to be expected. People age. They get harder and dimmer and weaker. Accept it as a fact of life and move on.

He annoys the hell out of you with his complaints about organic chicken versus caged chicken, his habit of waking before dawn, his defiant optimism, his overlarge coat which knocks your beakers on end, and his refusal to taste your divinely good bottle of pinot noir, but this aside, he makes you feel calm and right and out of control in the best way.

It's like living inside the sun.

It's like nothing has changed.

...

Jeffrey loves you, but you're projecting. You keep twisting up the small details, stuff that should be irrelevant and, in the larger scheme of things, is. But not to you. He pushes the sleeve of your shirt back with his fingertips, slide of skin on skin. He smiles at you and the crescendo of it fills up your whole chest. He tickles you until you can't breathe, mocks you mercilessly with a broad, wicked smile on his face, settles his leg next yours at the cinema, but it's not because he wants to kiss you. Jeffrey loves you because he's your friend.

You hate this: the hum and whir of your heart, the way it stops and starts. Turn it off. Hang your jacket on the hook on the wall. Whirr-clunk. Whirr-clunk. You stop and start. The pathetic appetite of your heart.

You'll get over it. With time, distance. So not right away. Maybe not until you stop having to look at him again, until you walk into the world and throw yourself into forgetting, forever. You wonder whether your lives will continue to coincide. Whether you and Jeffrey will keep colliding as you cannot seem to stop doing. What will happen, after all this. When you're old and the brilliance has gone out of your faces and there's nothing left to force you together. When that's gone, what will be left? When that's gone, all that will be left is each other. And you're not sure, now, if that's enough.

Jeffrey's right when he says you don't understand his life, his past, the experiences he had growing up: alone with no friends, no father, with a mother who remained coldly unaffected. The fear of being sent off. The ache of powerful loneliness.

What space do you have in his life, really? When you were children, you played and ran and shouted and laughed. But today there's no reason he would ever need you.

Whirr-clunk.

...

You're lying in your living room with your feet propped on a chair, just looking up at the ceiling, waiting for dark, when Jeffrey sits down next to you, looks you right in the face, and kisses you on the mouth.

You don't move. Your entire body feels like ice in hot sun. Like your edges are slipping away from you, dissolving, pooling at the floor by what used to be your feet, and it's so damn cold. If you move you'll leave bits of yourself behind. You can't close your eyes but you can barely look at him. He's kissing you hard, and fiercely, and your heart flickers inside your chest and scorches the backs of your ribs.

He pulls away. He looks determined and focused and terrible and lovely. You don't move. You don't even think you breathe.

"Aren't you going to say anything?" he asks.

You cannot.

"Fair's fair, right?" Jeffrey smiles at you. "Maybe I just wanted to see how you liked being kissed out of nowhere for once. Since it's always the other way around."

There's a choice to make here. You can brush it off. Brush it off, brush everything off, let it glance off you and never make contact with your skin, repelled as if by a magnetic field, warping the path of atoms and metals. Crack a joke, let Jeffrey know you're willing to back off—you are, of course you are, you never want to be someone who makes him uncomfortable, someone who wants what he can't give, but you are exactly that person, and right now, somehow, without reason, it is too difficult to lie.

You can brush it off. Or you can grab it by the wrist, pull it in close, whisper a truth in its ear. You can battle it with all that you've got.

You swallow. Your throat is dry, the words difficult to form. "I liked it."

His smile is impossible to read, but something in it shifts, just slightly, and so does the light in his eyes. "I know," he says, and you have no idea what to do with your hands.

"What are you going to do?" you ask here, against yourself. "When you feel like you can compose again?"

The smile slides off his face. He leans back against the wall. "No idea," he says. "What about you?" His gaze holds you suspended, a dragonfly caught on a pin.

You shrug. Your mouth is still warm and numb at the edges from kissing him. From when he kissed you. "Dunno." Whirr-clunk. You decide to be honest. "Whatever you want to do."

"Good," Jeffrey says. "That's what I was going say."

You can barely look at him. "You weren't going to say that."

"You read minds now?" His eyes flash. "Don't you ever tell me what I want. About anything."

You open your mouth, close it again. Shut your eyes. "I won't," you say and get to your feet. He knocks his shoulder against yours. The both of you go to dinner. You wander through the city like a sleepwalker. He takes you by the arm, leads you through it.

...

You don't know if he loves you or not. He told you not to tell him what he wants, and so you stop. You don't know if he loves you. You don't know anymore, either, if he doesn't.

...

He keeps kissing you. In places when there's no one to see you. In the bathroom after you finish brushing your teeth and are about to go to bed. Before breakfast, before anyone else wakes up and you're still rubbing the exhaustion out of your eyes. Quick, brief, chaste kisses. Nothing as rough as the first one, as inquiring. Just the brush of his mouth on yours. He catches you by surprise every single time. You're never expecting anything from him, and so you don't notice when he starts to give you everything.

Kisses the corner of your mouth. Kisses your forehead. Kisses the back of your hand and laughs when you start to turn pink. You don't want to question it—don't dare look it in the eyes, just wish you could take this and be satisfied with it and want nothing else for the rest of your useless damn life, but you're not made that way. You're just not. If he's working out some sort of repressed infatuation with you, well; you don't want to be left behind when he figures it out and decides, in the end, that he doesn't want you. You don't think you can survive a heartbreak like that for a second time. Not in here. Not like this. Not with him.

He kisses you and you react, grab his face with your hands, hold him back when he tries to pull away, to stand, to leave you again. "Don't," you say, and thank God no one is around, thank God for this tiny moment of privacy behind a building in this city, this place where nothing is sacred or secret, this place where everyone except you knows how you feel.

"You can't just keep doing this to me," you say. "Not if you don't mean it."

"I mean it," Jeffrey says, too flippantly, too—something, just not enough, why is it never enough for you—

"I am in love with you," you say. It's the first time you've ever said it. "It's not a joke for me, Jeffrey. This isn't—this is my life, okay, my real feelings, and you can't just—use me like this, like it doesn't mean anything, because it does—it means so much to me—"

"I'm not using you," he says, and you shut the hell up. "When we—when I didn't have you anymore, then, that was—the loneliest I've ever been in my entire life, and that's—" He shakes his head. "I've spent a long damn time being lonely."

"I know," you say, creakingly.

"No, you don't," he bites back, and that's fair. That's true. In a way. "I think about being here and I think about you," Jeffrey says. "I think about leaving here and I think about you. I don't know what that means."

"I think about you and I think about the rest of my life," you say, because. Well.

That, you think, scares him. Perhaps. Just a little. "I won't kiss you again," he says. "Not if I don't mean it."

"Okay," you say. Even knowing you did the right thing, this moment still stings. In ways you least expect, like hidden shards of broken glass on the floor.

...

He doesn't kiss you for the next three weeks.

Good, you think. It's over.

Whirr. Clunk. The pathetic hunger of your troubled heart.

...

You're lying on the couch, the pull-out bed where he sleeps, half-awake. There's a placidity to the grinding inside your chest. You're safe here, where it's quiet, where there's shelter from all the chaos going on outside. Jeffrey is reading something, you don't even know what. The quiet flipping of pages. You're going fall asleep soon and wake up when one of the other tenants starts yelling, probably, about who-knows-what, or if Jeffrey shifts and the thin mattress moves beneath the two of you.

You can hear him breathing. He keeps taking these long breaths, like he's deliberating, like he's thinking about something. Flips the page. Quiet. Deep inhale. You're not counting but you're making sure they're there.

Finally: "Damn it," he says, and rolls over, drops the book on the rug in the process, and leans down into you, kisses you, soundly, hard.

You have no restraint left, no defenses, no trenches with barbed wire lining the front. You reach up your hands and put them in his hair and you kiss him back and you hope, when he lets go, that you don't see anything terrible in his eyes. You kiss him and keep kissing him and then he pulls away, so slowly, and looks at you with sunset eyes.

"You don't know," he's saying, vehemently; "you don't know about anything."

"Jeffrey?" you ask, because you don't know what to say, if you should say anything at all, but you can't keep your mouth shut.

"I want to kiss you," he says. He looks bewildered, and angry, and determined. Determined, above all. "I have no idea what that means, and I'm sorry. That's not fair. But you're my best friend."

"I am," you say. Your throat is seizing up, painful, but there's something dreadful and dangerous spreading its wings behind your ribs; something, you think, that might even be hope.

Neither of you know what you're doing. You're too old for this, for God's sake. But you have each other. And that's not nothing. That's more than you've ever had before. That's more, you think, than maybe you deserve. You love him. You are in love with him.

"You are," Jeffrey says again. "And I'm…." He drifts off. Looks at you. Here it is, here's the beginning of everything.

"Mine," you say, and he nods. You feel electric.