She still couldn’t think what to say. Captive. For a month. Oddly, her mind fixed on the fact that it also meant a month’s absence from school — and then something seemed to click.
“Why did no one know to tell me?” There was still that colourless clarity in her voice. “Am I a secret, Isaac? A shame? You wanted — ” She cut short, to try to reimpose the lack of emotion that shattered the last word. “You didn’t want to be a fling to me, so what am I to you, then?”
And then her throat closed up with incipient tears, and she couldn’t say anything more.
Isaac looked down and frowned. “It’s not you, Summer,” he said, looking up at her and walking over to her. He hesitantly reached out for her hand. “They’re my pack, yeah, but they aren’t really my friends. I don’t really have friends,” he said, frowning and looking at her. “I didn’t tell them because it just… I don’t talk about relationships or anything with them,” he said, swallowing and looking her over.
Summer took his hand, blinking. Tears slipped down her face, and she smeared them away with her free hand, though they kept falling. Moving to bury her face against his shoulder, she mumbled, “I thought you had left me. That I had driven you away.”