Somewhere in the Middle

The Most Amazing Thing

"Got any twos?"

Evie smirked. "Go fish."

They were down to the final few cards, and she was winning.

"Damn," Luke muttered, sitting cross-legged across from her on the bed in her hotel room.

She giggled a little, and watched as he lifted a card from the dwindling deck between them, his lips pursing as he studied his new hand.

All while she studied him. She'd been studying him for the past several hours, waiting for the way he looked at her to change, to shift into disinterest, into... disdain. But Luke laughed without fear, without control, without any kind of inhibition. He smiled without thought, without waiting for a reason, without feeling like he had to.

Just as he always had.

"How is it possible that you're going to beat my ass at another round?" he said after a moment, not looking up from his cards, and Evie loved that he was still taking the game so seriously.

She wasn't even sure how they'd started playing—only that Luke had spotted the deck of cards when it fell out of her bag (she played a lot of Solitaire when she was alone in her room) and decided that they had to play Go Fish. Which Evie was pretty sure she hadn't played since she was a kid, but she went along with it. Because it was hard not to go along with Luke when he got excited about something.

"Don't know," she said, flicking her gaze up to him. "Guess I'm just good at it."

He met her eye, his lips going lop-sided. "There's no being good at Go Fish. It's all luck."

"Tell that to my five game winning streak," she said, enjoying the way he laughed once more.

She still felt unsettled. Exposed. Like she'd cracked herself open and hadn't successfully shut everything up again, and now, cool air was whispering through the open seams of her chest, the spaces between her ribs, licking at the edges of the shame she'd kept hidden for so long.

But Luke was acting as if what she'd revealed didn't matter. Like... it didn't faze him at all.

Not that she thought it would. But what Jeff had done to her—the way it had affected her—it had become such a big part of her since she'd left him almost four years ago. Left him and the band before the tour ended, unable to go on knowing who he'd become, and what he'd done to her.

She shook her head a bit, hoping Luke wouldn't notice. It had been hard reliving all that today, and the memories kept coming back in all the quiet moments. Jeff—the malice in his eyes as he admitted with a strange, twisted sort of pleasure that he'd fucked his way across the country, then come back to her bed each night. That he'd enjoyed sex with strangers more than he'd ever enjoyed sex with her. The way he'd smirked as her tears fell, the way he'd asked her if she really thought what they had between them was going to last—if what he felt for her in high school was actually real. How her heart, broken into a million pieces, had still throbbed when he'd told her that she was nothing more than an annoyance anymore.

And the worst part of it all—how stupid she'd felt. How... used. How fucking naive she'd been to think that the guy she'd met as a vapid freshman was still the man she knew at that point, nearly five years later. That a musician as talented and passionate as Jeff was would want something lasting with her.

So, she'd left him, left that tour with what little dignity she had left, and promised herself to never fall for someone like him again. To never be blinded by passion and romantic sensibilities and pretty words ever, ever again.

"Hey," a soft voice said, and only when she opened her eyes, met Luke's concerned stare, did she realize she'd had them squeezed shut. "You okay?"

But here she was, looking at Luke, just as attracted to his passion, his charm, his beautiful, beautiful mind. He was different, Evie told herself. More, somehow. Real.