Free Bittersweet by Shewanda Pugh Page B

“You don’t …  miss him do you?”
    He hated himself for thinking it. After everything that had happened, all the danger, all the madness, he had to flirt with insecurity. He wanted to snatch the words back and swallow them, to ask her forgiveness, to tell her forget it. But he didn’t. He stole a look at her and kept quiet, letting the seconds tick by and his stomach roller derby as he waited on her answer.
    Edy twisted her fingers together so they tangled. “I miss talking to him.” Something in his face made her hesitate. Maybe a flash of doubt, a sprinkle of sickness. “I miss his friendship. At the same time,” she said slower, “I don’t him back in my life.” She shook her head. “That stuff about his cousin?” Edy shuddered and shrunk into her coat somehow, growing smaller even as she grimaced. “It’s all so creepy. And we haven’t even talked about how he came over to snitch on us that night because he’s against the whole idea of me and you. I mean, I know you two have you’re your differences, but no true friend would do something like that.”
    “He was tired of being your friend, Edy, and in need of a little promotion.” Frustration stabbed him with her tentative stare. Would she make him say it? Would she drag words out of him he’d tried to bury?
    She would. “Listen, Cake. When he—we—thought Wyatt was dying, his last words were ‘tell Edy I love her.’” In his dreams, whenever Wyatt asked the same, Hassan backed away from him, firm in denial, uncommitted, unwilling.
    In real life, he’d promised to deliver the message.
    In real life, he’d promised to tell his girlfriend that the dying guy he hated was in love with her.
    Edy blinked, blinked liked the world faded from sight, even as the sun sat fat on the horizon. “God, I’ve been stupid,” she finally said.
    They walked on in thick silence for awhile.
    “Even if he wasn’t my friend,” she said. “I was his. I know I’ve wronged him in some ways, too.”
    There. Her mind was made up. Her mind was made up whether she knew it or not.
    “I’ll go with you to visit him,” Hassan said. After all, she shouldn’t have to go by herself and there was no way she was going by herself.
    He pulled Edy to him and tucked away a thousand complicated emotions.
    “I’m sorry for being so difficult,” she said.
    He couldn’t help the smile. “That didn’t just start.”
    She slipped her gloved hands into his coat pockets and jabbed his side with a finger. He laughed and got the benefit of her squeezing him in even closer. Her head rested smooth on his shoulder as the winter wind howled. A toddler careened by drunkenly; a woman barreled after, shoving an empty stroller and shouting for Adam to come back.
    Hassan tilted Edy’s chin up for one, two, three kisses. After that, he stopped counting.
    “Hassan? Edy? Is that you?”
    His heart petered to a stop. A thud, another thud, then death. Slowly, he and Edy untangled. He wanted to ask her if she was half as dead as him.
    Dr. Chandra Dhumal pulled up right alongside them, long black ponytail swishing as she jogged in place.
    “You know,” Dr. Dhumal said and shoved back her burgundy sweatband as it slipped low on brow. “When I saw you two kissing, I thought I had to be mistaken. Surely, Dr. Phelps or Dr. Pradhan would have mentioned this. So, I came over to see, and yes, it is you.”
    They let her words hang, naïve and reaching, dangling in a bubble of absurdity.
    “Yeah, well, you see it’s us now,” Hassan said. “So, you know.” Get bent.
    Edy looked brittle enough to break. Maybe she didn’t like his tone. “Well, tell us, Dr. Dhumal, how have you been? Any new discoveries in …”
    Hassan tried to bat back his smile before mouthing, “Sociology,” to her. It appeared one of them had been paying more attention than the other when some of their dads’ colleagues came over for dinner.
    “Er … Geography?” Edy finished
    Dr. Dhumal picked up the pace,