Page 91 of Quiver

There was no normal for them, just a constant pendulum swing from one extreme to the other, and she’d only just started to feel like maybe they’d settled into the middle. Still, she didn’t dare say so right after the conversation she’d overheard without understanding. “Are you telling me to leave now?”

Fletcher rolled her eyes. “I have my doctor’s appointment Monday. Don’t make it sound like I’m kicking you out into the snow.”

“I didn’t mean to, but maybe you could at least help me understand what you are doing.”

“I knew you’d make a bigger thing out of this than it is.”

“It? I don’t even know what it is in this context. The phone call? Your injury? Me sleeping here? I don’t understand what’s happening.”

“Nothing.” Fletcher sighed. “It’s nothing.”

“Okay, but what am I supposed to do with that?”

“Do whatever you want.” Fletcher turned to go, before adding, “You’ve always been good at that.”

“What the hell?” Kylie hopped off the couch and came around to cut Fletcher off before she reached the stairs. “What’s happening right now?”

“I don’t know.” She looked everywhere but her eyes.

“Fletch,” she pleaded, “talk to me.”

“I want to go to bed.”

“Okay, but why the potshot on your way out? Why the walls going back up? Why the half directions about me leaving without any real explanation.”

The muscle in Fletcher’s jaw strained as she ground her teeth together, either trying to find an answer, or maybe trying to hold one in.

“Come on, I understand it’s hard—”

“You don’t,” she finally snapped. “You don’t understand anything about what I’m feeling.”

“Then tell me.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because we don’t have these conversations anymore.”

Kylie winced at the quiet steel in her voice, and she clenched her fist at the urge to shoot back in kind. The words hurt, but Fletcher was clearly hurting, too. Kylie clung to that understanding as she tried again. “You’re right. We haven’t talked to each other openly, vulnerably, in a long time, but I thought we were getting better.”

Fletcher turned away again, but Kylie caught her shoulder and gently ran her hand over a strong bicep and down, aching for some connection, but as she reached her wrist, tightened fingers refused to open to her. “We’ve done a lot of things this week that we haven’t done in a long time, things neither of us believed we’d ever do again.”

“That’s a problem,” Fletcher growled.

“Why?”

Fletcher shook her head slowly, and Kylie’s entire body coiled.

She traced her fingers over the compass and arrow on Fletcher’s forearm with the gentle tip of one finger. “Why?”

“Because you hurt me, Kye!” Fletcher exploded. “More than hurt, broke. You broke me in a way I wasn’t sure could ever be mended, and I’m still not.”

Kylie stepped back, or maybe got knocked back by the raw force of the pain ripping through Fletcher’s voice.

“At first, I was shocked. Everything happened so fast, and I kept waiting to wake up, or for you to, because who the hell ever dreamed of some agent from New York coming to see a small university production and whisking away the one person I cared most about. It didn’t even feel plausible. We had so many plans.” Fletcher’s voice cracked, and for a second, it seemed like she might cry like the bewildered kids they’d been in those moments, but then the steel edged back in. “When I realized you were really gone, something inside me crumbled into a pile of dust and resentment.”

Kylie sighed, remembering her own sense of emptiness when she’d finally faced the same sort of truth.