JOSH

As usual, it takes Emily a solid ten minutes of silent menu perusal before she decides what she wants. We’ve been eating at this restaurant for years. I always get the same thing, so I spend her menu inspection time sorting the sugars, straightening the salt and pepper, staring out the window trying not to think about Hazel.

Hazel beneath me, the warmth of her hands moving down my back, the bite of her nails. Her teeth on my shoulder and the sharp cry she made the second time she came.

The second time. When she came, and came, and came.

I’m definitely not thinking about the quiet way she mumbled she loved me when I carefully lowered her semiconscious naked body onto her bed.

Emily slides the menu on the table, snapping my focus away from the window and back to the approaching waiter. She smiles up at him, giving her order before I give mine, and handing over our menus. We’ve yet to say a word to each other, and it feels like the tense beginning of a chess match, or the hush before the first serve at Wimbledon.

My sister and I unroll our napkins in unison, tucking them onto our laps, and then we inhale, eyes meeting. When she looks at me, she doesn’t have to say what she’s thinking. But this is Emily, so of course she does.

“Dude.”

I nod. “I know.”

“Josh.” With her elbows planted on the table, she leans in closer. “Like … seriously.”

I shake my head, and thank the waiter when he returns to set my coffee in front of me. “I know, Em.”

“What is this?” she asks, spreading her hands as if Hazel and I are naked right here at the table.

I lift a shoulder. Honestly, I have no idea. It just happened. But looking back, it feels like we’d been headed there since the first time we saw each other at the barbecue. Even on our dates, she’s always been the center of my attention, the person I’m really with.

“Is it a thing?”

Emily’s foot bounces under the table and I reach out with my own, stilling it. “To who?” I ask. “Her or me?”

“Either! Or both.”

I pour a splash of cream into my mug. “I don’t know what it is, okay? My head is a mess.”

“I know you, Josh,” she practically growls. “I know you. You’re the most serially monogamous guy I’ve ever met. You don’t just have sex with someone. I don’t care how drunk you are.”

What can I say to this? It’s the same thing she said under her breath at her house before dinner. She isn’t wrong. I’ve never had casual sex. I’ve honestly never understood the impulse; sex is so supremely intimate. I give away a nonrefundable piece of myself, every time.

When I don’t answer, she taps her index finger on the table as if to further emphasize her point. “You’re not that guy. You’ve never even tried to be that guy.”

“Emily.” I put the cream down gently, feeling the tension from my fingertips all the way up my arm. “I know this about myself. Look at me, I’m not being blasé. It’s messing with my head, okay?”

“Oppa,” she asks, sliding into Korean, “do you love her?”

I don’t answer. I can’t, because it feels like the idea of saying it breaks something inside me open, exposing this precious organ. I’ve been avoiding the word since I stepped back from her bed, found my clothes in the dryer, and left her apartment. I gave love away so easily to Tabby, and compared to what I feel for Hazel? Those emotions now seem pathetically dilute, and still—I was bruised. That word—love—feels like a wrecking ball. I get the mental image of cracking open a walnut and staring at the pieces of flesh in my palm, knowing it can’t ever go back together.

“Josh?”

It seems hard to find enough air to form words. Hazel’s mouth and her shoulders, the soft pink tips of her breasts, her bursting laugh, and the quiet way she told me to stay inside her before she fell asleep beneath me on the floor—it all swims in my head. “I don’t know.”

My sister leans back in her chair like she’s been pushed. “ ‘I don’t know’ means yes.”

“I think I might.” I look at Emily. “I think I might be in love with her.”

Our food is delivered and we thank the waiter with mumbled words. I watch Emily lift her fork and poke at her salad. Suddenly, I can’t even imagine eating.

What if it’s not just a confused infatuation after good sex? What if it’s what my brain and heart seem to believe, and I really do love Hazel? What if she’s it for me, and I’m not it for her?

I push my plate an inch or two farther away.

“Josh, you guys are so different.”

It’s honestly the last thing I need to hear right now. “Come on. I know that.”

“She’s never going to be chill. Hazel has no chill.”

Despite my mood, this makes me laugh. “Em. Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes with her knows that.” I’m hit with a mental image of Hazel’s purple palm while she was cooking me pancakes. I wonder whether I’ll ever learn where the stain came from.

And as if she’s said something unkind, Emily adds in a whisper, “But she’s the best. Hazel has the biggest heart.”

A beast inside me has tightened a fist around my own heart when she says this. Hazel is without a doubt the best person I’ve ever known.

“I thought you wanted to set us up, Em. After the barbecue?”

“I did,” she says. “But you’re so close now. It worries me.”

“Me too.”

“You can’t hurt her.”

I meet my sister’s eyes and see the heat there. It’s a moment before I can speak past the emotion clogging my throat. “I wouldn’t—I won’t.”

“I’m serious.” She points her fork at me. “You have to be sure. You have to be positive. Hazel’s like this rogue star that just sort of floats around. She has a lot of friends—because how can you not love her?—but only a few she’s close to. You’re really important to her. She would honestly break if she lost you, Josh.”

I look up at her, skeptical. Hazel is made of brick and fire and iron. “Come on, Em.”

“You don’t think I’m serious?”

“Hazel isn’t fragile. She’s a brute.”

“Where you’re concerned she is. She idolizes you.” She pulls her cheek up in a sarcastic smile. “God knows why.”

I sigh, blinking down at the swirling white in the brown coffee.

“But if you changed your mind about something like that,” Emily says, “I think that’s the one thing that could dim her light. We both know Hazel is a butterfly. I think you have the power to take the dust from her wings.”