Page 98 of Blitz

“Duly noted.”

“But you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have a reason.”

“I miss him,” I say flatly. “I messed up. I ruined the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Yeah, you did,” Sam says harshly.

“I need to know…”

“We’re not your go-between,” she snaps. “You can’t use us to—”

Miles kicks me under the table. I think he meant to get her. I wince and he frowns.

“Let’s all take a breath here,” he says, ever the peacemaker. “What do you need to know?”

I swallow. “How… how is he?”

“He keeps his cards pretty close to his chest.”

I wince. That’s what I was afraid of. “Has he… talked about it?” My friends have made me talk it to death.

“We know the jist of what happened,” Sam finally says. “You’re not making yourself many friends here, are you?”

Annoyance bubbles up within me. “Why the fuck do you hate me so much? What did I ever do to you?”

“It’s not what you did to me, it’s what you did to him,” she snaps. “You broke his heart.”

“He’s the one who dumped me! He’s the one who ended things.”

“I’m not talking about right now,” she says hotly. “I’m talking about however long ago you were together. You destroyed his soul. It’s only in the last few weeks that we’ve seen a hint of his real personality. I hate you for turning him into a shell of a person. I hate that you had to come back around just for us to see who he really is. I hate that he’s so broken up over you that he’s still barely coping two plus years later.”

My heart is in my throat. “Barely coping?”

“He’s miserable,” Miles says gruffly. “He misses you.”

“I miss him, too. I miss him a lot.”

It’s not the prize of having a boyfriend. It’s not the warm body in my bed.

It’s having a partner in this life, someone by my side. Someone who supports me and lets me lean on them when the going gets tough, and lets me support them when they need a hand. Someone who believes in the same things I do, someone whose values and ideals match up to mine. Someone who wants the same things in life that I do.

No, not someone. Him.

We’re a perfect match on paper. Our chemistry is out of control. It’s just our current lifestyles that are out of sync.

I’ll sacrifice nights out with my friends. I’ll give up drinking if it makes him happy. I don’t know how to get better at the coping with the emotional overload that comes with sex.

But I can talk to him. I can let him hold me and believe him when he says it will turn out all right.

“I want him back,” I announce to his friends.

Sam’s eyes are hard. “Why should he even agree to talk to you again?”

Miles kicks me again. I flinch, and he flushes.

“Because she loves him,” he answers for me. “And sometimes we do crazy things for the people we love, like ambush them in the middle of disciplinary hearings.”

She frowns. “But—”