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He looked up at me.

The porch light caught his eyes.

I forgot what I had been trying to accomplish.

Then he stood, and the moment changed. His expression closed a little. He handed me the towel instead of wiping the mud away himself.

I knew that retreat. I hated it.

“Why do you even care how anyone else treats me,” I asked, “when you can barely stand to be civil to me yourself?”

His hand stopped halfway to the tap.

For a second, neither of us moved.

Then his eyes met mine fully, and it was like being struck.

“Don’t, Hazel. Just don’t.” His voice had gone low and tight. “Neither of us is prepared to deal with what happens if you rattle this cage.”

I stared at him. The music carried around the corner of the house. Someone down by the water laughed.

He was standing close enough that I could still feel the warmth of him, and I had no idea what he had just threatened me with.

An argument?

The truth?

Something worse than being hated without knowing why?

“Why do you hate me so much?” I asked. My voice trembled. So did my lips.

His jaw clenched.

“I said don’t.”

He reached past me and shut off the water.

That was apparently all the answer I was going to get.

I looked down at my hands. They were clean now. I kept rubbing them with the towel anyway.

He’d always been the brooding one. A natural leader, but a quiet one. Clayton was fun, easygoing, not shallow, but not so deep you didn’t know what he was thinking most of the time.

Whereas Declan was too deep.

Deep enough that, somewhere along the way, I’d let myself drown in him.

“I wasn’t asking you to make a speech,” I told him. “You don’t even have to like me. I’d settle for knowing what I did.”

Something moved in his face. For one stupid second, I thought he might actually answer.

Instead, he looked toward the water.

I had become very good at waiting for him. Waiting for him to speak. Waiting for him to look at me. Waiting for whatever terrible mistake I’d made to stop mattering.

It was humiliating to realize how much of a relationship you could construct out of waiting for someone to participate.

“Let’s get that mud off you,” he said finally. “Come here.”