Page 83 of Things We Left Behind

She gave the night sky a small smile. “So you admit to being partially human.”

“I’ll deny it if you repeat it.”

She hugged her arms tighter around her and hunched her shoulders against the cold. Slowly, I moved closer until my arm brushed her shoulder, lending her some of my heat.

“What are we supposed to do? Just forgive and forget?” she asked.

“That’s not possible,” I said dryly.

She let out a short, bitter laugh. “Tell me about it.”

“We have to come up with some sort of solution. For them.”

We both glanced over our shoulders to the kitchen where everyone was gathered around the island with coffee and cobbler.

“They look really happy without us,” Sloane observed.

“Then we’ll find a way to keep them happy with us.”

“Let’s start with no interaction between us when we’re in the group,” she suggested. “I don’t think we’re ready for polite small talk.”

I hated to admit it, but she was right. It was safer to just avoid each other until we developed a tolerance.

“Fine. And if for whatever reason one of us doesn’t feel they can stand the sight of the other for a particular event, we make prior arrangements to stagger our attendance.”

“That is such a rich-­person-­fancy-­dinner-­gala thing to say. No offense,” she added quickly, then winced. “This is going to be harder than I thought.”

“It’s a habit. Nothing more,” I insisted.

I wasn’t about to allow a habit to control me. Unironically, I pulled my daily cigarette from the breast pocket of my shirt and produced my lighter.

Sloane looked pointedly at the cigarette as I lit it. “Some habits are harder to break than others.”

She had no idea the struggle I’d endured that afternoon after our exchange in her office. I’d wanted nothing more than to soothe away the flood of anger with my daily dose of nicotine. My fingers had itched to hold the filter between them; my ears longed for the scratch of the lighter.

But I’d refused to give in.

A reward. Not a crutch.

A reward was a marker for an accomplishment. A crutch was a symbol of weakness. And I had no tolerance for weakness, especially not within myself.

“In the future, if you feel you can’t control yourself and the need to insult me is too overwhelming, we’ll deal with it privately,” I suggested, exhaling smoke toward the moon.

“Me?” She turned and looked up at me. “You didn’t even make it through your first taco tonight before cracking like an egg.”

“Yes, well. It’s over now.” I both loved and hated it when I had her undivided attention. I forced myself to look away from her.

“From now on, to me you’ll just be the vaguely racist, misogynistic, hard of hearing uncle everyone avoids engaging with at Thanksgiving.”

“Andyouare nothing more than Naomi and Lina’s annoying invisible friend I pretend to acknowledge when they insist on setting a place at the table for you,” I said.

Sloane stepped away from the railing and held out her hand. “Deal?”

I covered her hand with mine. It was so small, and delicate in my grip. “Deal.”

It would be so easy to break something so fragile. Ithadbeen so easy to break. I hated that we both had that knowledge.

Snap.