Page 115 of Things We Hide from the Light

“Errrrr!” Sloane, already one shot down, made a loud buzzer noise. “It’s against the law to lie during girls plus Stef afternoon.”

Naomi nodded. “Agreed. Rule number one: No lying. We aren’t here to pretend everything is fine. We’re here to be here for each other. I said here too many times. Now it doesn’t sound like a word. Here. Here?”

“Here.” Sloane tried frowning.

“They been drinking already?” Joel asked me with the arch of a sexy silver eyebrow.

I shook my head. “Nope.”

He wisely filled two more glasses with water and set them in front of my friends before disappearing down the bar.

“Heeeeeere,” Naomi enunciated.

“Oh my God. Fine! I’mnotfine,” I admitted.

“It’s about damn time. I was afraid you were going to make us keep going,” Sloane said, picking up her second shot and downing it.

“The first step is admitting you’re a disaster,” Stef said sagely.

“I’m not fine. I am a disaster. Even my family doesn’t know what I do for a living because they can’t handle the thought of me anywhere near even the slightest whiff of danger. If they had any idea how dangerous my job is, they would fly out here, form a protective shield around me, and force me to move home with them.”

My tiny personal audience all watched me over the rims of their glasses.

“And I’m drinking water because I had a heart condition that almost killed me when I was fifteen. I missed out on all the normal teenage things thanks to surgeries and being the weird girl who died in front of an entire stadium of people. It’s fixed now, but I still get PVCs when I’m stressed. And I’m stressed as hell now. Every stupid flutter reminds me what it was like to almost die and then live a suffocating half-life of homeschooling, medical appointments, and overbearing parents who I couldn’t blame for being overbearing because they watched me essentially die on a soccer field.”

“Whoa,” Sloane said.

“More alcohol, Joel,” Naomi begged, holding up her now empty wineglass.

“So excuse me if I don’t tell everyone I meet all the details of my life. I spent enough of it being micromanaged and reminded that I’m not normal and I won’t ever have normal. Until I got here and I met Nashhole.”

“Good one,” Sloane said with an approving nod.

“What happened when you got here and met Nash? Sorry. I mean Nashhole?” Naomi asked, hanging on my every word.

“I took one look at him and his whole wounded, broodything—”

“By ‘thing,’ do you mean penis?” Stef asked.

“I do not.”

“Stop interrupting her,” Naomi hissed. “You took one look at his wounded, broody not-penis and what?”

“Ilikedhim,” I confessed. “I really liked him. He made me feel like I was special and not in the weird cardiac-arrest-in-front-of-everyone way. He made me feel like he needed me. No one’s ever needed me. They’ve always protected me or babied me or avoided me. God, my parents are trying to book plane tickets just to bully their way into my next cardiology appointment so they can hear my doctor say I’m still fine.”

More drinks appeared in front of Naomi and Sloane. Joel slid a bowl of nuts my way. “Those are fresh out of the bag. No one fingered them up yet,” he assured me.

“Thank you for the unfingered nuts,” I said.

“So Nash came clean—after some berating—about the panic attacks he’s been having and how you helped him,” Naomi said.

“I didn’t take advantage of him,” I insisted.

“Honey, we know. No one thinks that. Not even Nash. He’s a Morgan. They say stupid things when they’re mad. But I have to tell you, it’s nice to see him mad,” Naomi confessed.

“Why?”

“Before you, he wasn’t mad or happy or anything. He was like a photocopy of himself. Just flat, lifeless. And then along cameyou and you gave him something to care enough about to get mad.”