He smiled, eyes gentle. "Big-time suck, yes." He studied my face. "You aren’t going to cry, are you?"
I thought about it, figuring out how I felt. "No."
"It’s okay to cry," he said.
I shook my head. "I don’t want to cry."
"You never want to cry," Nathaniel said.
I couldn’t argue that, so instead I let myself soften in their arms, and kissed first Micah, and then turned so I could lay my cheek against Nathaniel’s face and whisper, "I’ll cry later, at home."
"You’ll cry when it finally hits you," he said.
"I don’t feel like crying now."
"How do you feel?" he asked.
"You could read my feelings."
"You’ve taught me better psychic manners than that," he said.
"I came with better manners than that," Micah said.
I nodded, and then started to sit back on the bench. They moved back to let me. "I feel sort of hollow, like there’s this empty space inside me that I didn’t know was there. Fragile—which I hate."
Jason reached past Nathaniel to pat my thigh, just a friendly touch. "It’s okay, we’re here."
I nodded. That was the problem with loving people: it made you weak. It made you need them. It made the thought of not having them the worst thing in the world. I heard Bennington’s words in my head: It’s a terrible thing to lose someone you love. I knew it for truth, because I’d lost my mother to death when I was eight, and my fiancé in college to his mother’s pressure. Come to think of it, that had been because I wasn’t blond and Caucasian enough for his family. They hadn’t wanted their family tree darkened quite that much. Was it any wonder I had a complex about it? It would have been a miracle if I hadn’t.