Page 138 of Gamebreaker

Mia appeared at my elbow thirty seconds later.

"You ready to go?"

"Yeah." I looked back toward the tunnel once, which I immediately regretted, and then at Mia. She wasn't going to let me argue her out of this one, and I knew there was no fighting her coming with me. "Yeah. Let's go."

I walked out of the arena without looking back a second time.

This was me, closing the loop. Moving forward. Extracting myself gracefully from a situation that was only going to keep hurting if I let it.

I didn't feel closed. I didn't feel like I'd gotten a single atom of the closure I'd come here for.

I felt like I'd just said goodbye to something I wasn't ready to lose and had to do it anyway.

When I got back to my apartment, I changed into pajamas, washed my face, tied on my bonnet, and removed the bold lip that had served its armor function admirably and deserved a rest.

I got into bed.

And stared at the ceiling.

Cam's face at halftime kept replaying behind my eyes. Those three seconds where every wall she kept between herself and the world had momentarily failed, and she'd just looked at me, openly, helplessly, like she didn't know how to stop.

She asks about you. Every day.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my closed eyes, lips trembling. Tears threatened to spill down my cheeks, and as hard as I tried, I couldn't stop them.

Nothing had changed. That was the thing I had to keep coming back to, the fact I had to anchor myself to when the feeling of those three seconds made me want to do something stupid and irreversible. Cam was still closeted. I still couldn't be a secret. The incompatibility that had walked me out her door six days ago hadn't dissolved just because she asked about me every day, hadn't shifted because she'd looked at me across a basketball court like I was the most agonizingly painful thing she'd ever seen.

We were still impossible. Incompatible.

I knew that.

I knew it rationally, completely, in the part of my brain that had survived enough to know the difference between loving someone and being able to be with them.

The problem was the other part. The part that kept replaying amber eyes and rough hands and the low confidence in her voice in the dark. The part that had felt, for one perfect night, more like itself than it had in years.

That part wasn't interested in rational.

That part was also, apparently, not interested in closure.

I turned onto my side, pulling the blanket up.

Monday, I'd tell my therapist the truth. Tomorrow, I'd make a plan for moving forward, for filling my life with enough genuine good things that the absence of one specific thing became survivable. Tomorrow, I'd be strategic and healthy and emotionally mature about this entire disaster.

Tonight I was going to lie here and think about amber eyes and three seconds of halftime eye contact and the excruciating, useless, completely real fact that I was not over Cam Russo.

Not even a little.

Not even close.

I closed my eyes and thought about how she'd looked playing hurt, all that controlled force aimed at the one thing that couldn't hurt her back.

I thought about her asking about me. Every day.

I thought about one perfect night I couldn't stop reliving, and the morning that had ended it, and the impossible distance between who we were and what we needed.

I fell asleep like that.

Still impossible.