Noah
I almost said it. Whatever it was building in my chest right before I shut it down, some sentence I don't even have fully formed yet, sitting right there at the edge of my mouth, and I swallowed it back down because saying it out loud felt like stepping off a ledge I'm not ready to fall from.
Neither of us moves. That's the part that undoes me a little, sitting there in the dark with his knee still pressed against mine, both of us pretending the moment didn't just happen even though we both know it did.
"You were about to say something," Ethan says quietly.
"Was I?"
"You know you were."
I could keep deflecting. It's what I'm good at, what I've built a whole personality around, smoothing over anything real with a joke or a smile before it can get too close to the surface. Somethi
