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I blinked and shook my head.

“Sorry,” I said.

“No problem,” she said, her voice dazed. I knew I should be doing something, but I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to be.

A throat cleared and we both looked up like startled deer in car headlights.

“Your croissants,” Daisy said, holding out the bag to me. Her eyes flicked between me and Fiona and back again and she gave us both a smile.

“Enjoy.” She wasn’t just talking about the croissants. Oh, I was going to get an earful at work tomorrow.

I unrolled the top of the bag and pulled one of them out. Might as well, since Fi had eaten two.

She sipped her iced tea, but the tension between us had ratcheted up about five thousand notches. I could barely think with her sitting right across from me. I moved my legs and accidentally bumped her feet under the small table. I felt like all eyes were on us. I wished I could put up a wall that we could hide behind. But then I’d be alone with her and that wasn’t good either.

I couldn’t win.

We were crossing territory we’d already crossed, only this time we were older and a little bruised from the last encounter.

“I miss you. I miss you so much sometimes that it hurts,” she said quietly, staring at the plate of crumbs.

I opened my mouth to answer, but I couldn’t. I had missed her. I thought about all the times that I had wanted to tell her something I knew would make her laugh, or something that only she would understand. I’d lost count of how many times it had happened. I’d tried to ignore it, but that wasn’t possible. I’d filed those moments away in the backroom of my brain and had covered them with the hurt from our breakup. But now . ..

Now that cover was slowly sliding off and I was remembering how good things had been.

We sat again in silence and I felt like I was being ripped apart at the seams. Something had to give. Something had to happen. We teetered on a precipice and something had to give.

“I miss you, too,” I said, and she reached out to clutch my hand.

“I know I fucked up, Cricket. I know I did. But I just want to know if maybe . .. if maybe you would consider being my friend again?”

“I’ll have to think about it, Ladybug,” I said and she stroked her fingers along mine. I had to close my eyes because I couldn’t look at her. She was just too beautiful. Too much. She consumed me.

“Okay,” she said, taking her hand back. I shivered at the loss of contact. “That’s okay. I don’t want to pressure you. It just feels like we were meant to run back into each other for a reason.” Of course she would say that.

“Unfinished business?” I said, trying to lighten things up.

“Like ghosts?”

I shrugged one shoulder.

“But we’re not ghosts,” she said.

“Notyet.”

She smacked my shoulder.

“Don’t be morbid.”

Phew. Things had gotten a little too serious there.

Seven

In the end, we both finished all the croissants and I didn’t want to admit that to Daisy, so we ended up slinking out of the café. Well, not really slinking. We were both too full to slink.

“What now?” I asked. I’d gotten the feeling that she really didn’t want to go home and that was fine with me. “The house is available, apparently, since Lacey is here so you can come over and enjoy free air-conditioning and we can watch a movie while we digest,” I suggested. She nodded and said that would be fine.

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