“It’s not that I’m frightened or intimidated,” he continued, “I just don’t feel the need to fight for something that isn’t meant to be a fight. The dance? It matters to them. It matters to you. That’s okay. I’m not judging that. But it doesn’t mean the same thing to me.”
I looked at him for a long moment. “So… what does this mean? Are we breaking up?” I couldn’t even wrap my mind around that. We’d had so little time since school started. And whose fault was that? The snide little voice in the back of my head needed to stuff a sock in it.
Mathieu didn’t flinch. “We don’t have to. I like being with you. I like what we are. But you need space to figure this out. To see where those relationships might go. I don’t want you to regret anything.”
That word hit like a slow echo.Regret.
“Regret is what drove you to me in the first place,” he said, voice like velvet on stone. “I don’t want regret to be the reason you make any choice now. Not when you have this huge heart, Frankie. Not when it’s trying so hard to be fair to everyone but you.”
I swallowed hard.
Because he wasn’t hurt.
He wasn’t even trying to protect himself.
He was trying to protectme.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I said, barely above a whisper.
“I know,” he said. “That’s exactly why I’m not going to let you turn yourself into knots to spare me.”
He leaned in, brushed his knuckles against my cheek. His breath was a whisper against my lips.
“You’ll make the right choice,” he said. “Even if it’s not perfect. Even if it’s messy. You’ll make it with your whole heart. That’s enough.”
Then he kissed me. Light. Sure. Like punctuation on a sentence that had already ended.
“I trust you,” he murmured. “You need to know what could be, before you let anything go and if what could be is one of them, then I want you to have it.”
I forgot how to breathe.
“I won’t hold you back or make you choose.” Another kiss. “I will, however, be here for you.” The last kiss was almost butterfly light. “If they hurt you, I will find a way to extract violent reprisal.”
For some reason, the ferocity in that last sentence just made me laugh even as tears sparked in my eyes. His smile grew and when he wrapped an arm around me, I burrowed into him. The hug was everything I needed. Wrapped up in his scent and support, I rubbed my cheek against his chest.
“Mathieu…I really don’t know what I want right now.”
“I know,” he said, another smile kissing his words as he leaned back. “You are entitled. Maybe I will woo you to show them how it’s done.”
Woo. Who used the word woo?
Then he winked. “I’ll call you later?”
“I’d like that.”
Another brush of his knuckles against my cheek, then he walked away.
He didn’t look back.
For some reason, that made me want to cry more than anything else.
Chapter
Thirty-Four
FRANKIE
We weren’t even a full month into senior year and everything seemed to be upside down. I had a boyfriend who was taking a step back to let me explore things with my best friends. The same best friends who’d made me untouchable in the first place. They’d chased off anyone interested because theythoughtI wasn’t interested in dating.
