If I had a kid, I wouldn’t want them hanging around someone like me either, but that doesn’t make it not hurt. That doesn’t make my stomach not churn deep down, doesn’t make it not grow from a spark to a full-fledged panic attack, so that by the time Peak storms out of the back room, I’m already outside, gasping for cold air with my back pressed hard against the bricks and my head between my knees.
“Ridley.” She crouches down next to me, and I squeeze my eyes shut tighter. She combs her hand through my hair more gently than I deserve. “Want to hear something cool?”
I give her the tiniest nod, forcing my eyes open.
“Did you know that if you measured all the blood in a newborn, it would only equal about one cup?” she asks, her eyebrows raised as if I’m going to challenge her. I’m not. Mostly, I just want to know who decided to measure blood volume by baby. But then I start thinking of, like, freshly squeezed babies and all this other weird stuff, which kind of freaks me out more, and I put my head back down.
“Okay, wait,” she says. “That was a bad one.” She laces her fingers through mine, squeezing tight. “Let me think . . . um . . . did you know you’re less likely to get bitten by a shark if you blow bubbles in its face?”
I sniffle hard and wipe at my nose, hating the way the cold makes it run, while I let my brain catch up to what she just said. “Wait,” I say, my voice rasping out. “What kind of bubble mix can you use underwater?”
She wrinkles her forehead, and I drop my chin, realizing too late she doesn’t mean the soap kind you buy in the store. “I . . . see my error now.”
“Yeah, seriously.” She laughs and sits down next to me. “Feel a little better?”
“Not really.”
“It was just a panic attack. It’s over.”
I shake my head. “I shouldn’t be the reason you’re fighting with Vera.”
“You’re not!” She reaches for me again, but I slide back up the wall and shove my hands in my pockets.
“I heard you guys.”
“She’s just freaking out like she does every time she gets stressed. It’s not even about us. She just put a new title on Kickstarter, and it way overfunded, and she’s going nuts about distribution channels and finding a new offset printer. That’s it. I promise. She always takes it out on everybody around her. Mom and I generally try to avoid her when she first launches for this exact reason.”
“I just don’t want to be the thing that stands between you and the rest of your life.”
“You give yourself way too much credit.”
I feel like I’ve stepped into some kind of a trap here, and I don’t know how to get out of it. Because the truth is, I think her life would be better, easier, if I left, that it’s the right thing to do—not just for her, but for her family and mine.
But I’m selfish.
“Seriously, Ridley,” she says, dusting off her backside as she stands up. “If you think I’d give up my dreams for a relationship, you’re out of your mind. I love you, but I love myself way more.”
And my jaw drops, and I kind of huff out a breath, because we’ve never said it out loud before. Never, but that’s what this is, isn’t it? Love?
My sister used to say all the time, “You can’t love anybody else until you love yourself,” and I believed that for a little while. It made everything seem so much bleaker and more hopeless, but then I met Peak, and the thing is . . . I love her. I do.
And it has nothing to do with me loving myself, because I don’t even know where to start with that. But she makes me want to be here, to kiss that spot behind her ear that makes her breath catch, to hear her laugh when I fall off my skateboard, to see the faces she makes when she’s