How is love affiliated with the heart? I don't understand it either, how a muscle that sometimes stops pumping blood has enough left over to love. Maybe I've known love, the one that travels in veins and arteries, that comes and goes through the walls of the heart so easily.

There was one other thing that used to come and go so naturally. I welcomed it, and even if I hadn't, she would have come irregardless. And when she's in there, she catches me in that precipice between fight and flight, halting all sentient thought and committing me to the wanton desires of a beating muscle.

After her words, I'm stonewalled up here and there's no signal from down there. I've always had one answer.

She knows it. "Don't run."

"I don't have anywhere to run to."

Ashley pins me a lengthy, appraising look. "If that night the cops had to drag you out of the water wasn't you trying to run…"

"Do you really have to bring that up again?"

"We're not… it's not grade school anymore Spencer. You have to deal with the things you do." She squeezes her fingers into a fist, eyes misplaced in a burst of emotion. Her voice is laced with bitterness, her syllables are serrated. "Don't tell me you didn't know what you were in for the moment you hit the water. Don't tell me you knew what you were doing either, because clearly, you didn't!"

"What are you trying say?" I feel the sudden burst of anger flare on my cheeks. "That I'm crazy? That I need help? Well Ash, it seems like I have been for a while, until you decided to turn around and walk back into my life like you damn well never left and sort me out. What happened to dealing with the things you did? Is helping me now supposed to be some sort of consolation for you?"

Sealed with an unfamiliar contempt, her words take a moment longer to process. "You need me."

In that second, I know all our reserve is gone. Our forays are blind, blindly seeking out the softest and sorest spots. Maybe that's all I'm good for right now. "I needed you. I needed you when you left. And when dad found out about Ben. When Paula left. When my family fell apart; when I fell apart. When I called you over and over and no one answered. Look how that turned out. Don't you think I learned my lesson already? Do you really think I'm going to let you fool me twice?"

And her eyes say I've won. It doesn't feel good anymore, like a cathartic cry that won't stop late into the night.

"I–I'm not asking you to need me," she says in dulcet tones, "I just want to help you. Not because it's any consolation to me – God, seeing you like this... But because we used to be friends, and maybe we're not anymore, but because we used to be, and some part of me just wants to see you happy and healthy, like the girl I knew. And if you want to leave, after, fine. But all I ask is you just stay here until I know you're okay. Please. If not for me, for you."

"If not for me, for you?" A fifteen year old Ashley begged with her eyes, forehead creased and lips pouted in every too-cute-to-be-denied trick she knew.

"I'm still not doing this."

"You have no idea what you're missing out on. Come on, we went all the way to the beach…"

Her eyes flickered away, the sun catching in her irises just right, and I knew I was doomed.

"Well, you're still doing it." Her voice hiccuped at the end of her sentence in her excitement as she knocked me backwards as one arm came under my knees, and the other wrapped around my back.

I felt myself leave the ground, bridal style, almost effortlessly. I had no time to process her arm around my bare back and her unclothed stomach squashed against my left hip as she covered the last few feet of hot sand and I hit freezing water, my arms coming up instinctively to stop my falling motion.

She laughed as I broke the surface, shivering.

I bit my lip, caught the tang of salt, and flicked up the water with both hands, aiming for her face.

She spluttered. "Whoa, Spence. Chill."

"So chill you wouldn't believe it." I gave her my best I'm-up-to-no-good smile and she gave me one back.

That was the way Glen used to hold me down, wrists held together in an iron grip. But when Ashley did it, slender fingers almost reaching all the away around both my wrists, her hand coming around to my lower back to press me against her to contain my squirming, it made me wish she would and would never let go simultaneously.

"Ugh, Ash. Let go."

"Are you going to play nice?" Her breath brushed my ear, dripping with mirth.

I knew she felt my breath stutter, my stomach seizing, the rough of the goosebumps all over my skin. But only I felt the blind panic, the odd flipping and flopping in my abdomen. Only one thought occurred. "Let go of me!"

"Spence…" She stepped back, set back by my panicked tone. "Spence, what's wrong?"

"It's really cold." Covering my tracks, like always. She had to know.

"Wussy." She grinned, prompting a smile from me. "Let's grab our towels, c'mon."

"I'm never going to be the girl you knew." My mouth spits venom, my eyes beg her to understand.

She looks down, almost contrite. "I know."

I pick up fallen covers, discarded when I half-fell, half-jumped out of bed at Ashley's entrance. With our eye-contact broken, I attempt another blind foray, hoping she remembers. "But I'm still doing it."

I hardly dare to look. But even from my peripheral, I see her face light up like no other. "You did come all the way here."

It works. I smile. She smiles, and her voice is sure when she says, "So, you sleep okay?"

"Perfect."

The phone rings in the midst of another awkward silence. She starts moving away, stopping momentarily to speak to me. "I left clothes in the closet last night and food in the kitchen. Just uh, help yourself."

She's gone and I dress quickly, smiling when the clothes are almost identical to the ones I came in last night, only they're hers.

I walk into the kitchen to her perched on the counter, phone to her ear. "Just cancel it, okay? I have visitor. No, she can't wait."

She heaves an exasperated sigh. "You can't be serious."

I feel as if I'm moving through a series of out-of-body, awkward moments.

"Does my manager know you're being an ass?"

I turn and look out the loft-sized window, hiding a smile. Entranced, I miss the rest of her conversation until the slam of the phone back into the charger.

"Sorry about that."

I turn around, raising a teasing eyebrow although my face is apathetic. "Don't you have places to go?"

Ashley smiles, the bridge of her nose creasing. "I can just stay here. It's not the first time I've never shown up for a press conference."

"I thought your bad-influence days were over."

"Well, I hope they are." She smiles ruefully at me. "Coffee on the counter."

She doesn't make a move, and the coffee machine is right next to her. The proximity will be awkward, but it's been a long time since the luxury of coffee. I approach her warily, and she nudges an empty cup out of a stack and towards me.

I'm right next to her when she says, "I didn't know how you liked yours."

"Still the same." My arm brushes her leg as I reach for the sugar.

"Oh. Figures."

Unable to read her tone of voice, I look up. But she's looking down into her coffee.

"Seriously, you don't have to stay here. You should go."

"You're a visitor, and I have never left a visitor alone in my house."

"Have I ever been a visitor in your house?"

She pauses, eyes wide as she peruses mine. "No. No you haven't." Then she's across the room, scrounging in the closet for heels.

Maybe she's decided a little distance would be good for us. Or maybe just me. Maybe she still doesn't want to leave me here. Maybe I don't want to be left alone here. But all of those things just float through the uncertainty in our minds as I watch her staring wistfully at the door, purse halfway to her shoulder.

"My number is in the notebook by the phone," she adds. "And it's multi-purpose. Emergencies, pizza, dry-cleaning…"

I can't help but laugh. Just as shocked as she is, her eyes go from dinner-plate wide to hooded with an undeniable sparkle right in the centre – she looks like she wants to say something, but doesn't comment.

Her heels click across laminated wood. "I'll be back by noon." Pausing stiffly with the door halfway open, she turns back to look at me. "I'll see you?"

"Bye." I wave limply at her back. She's asking me to promise in an unfamiliar, subtle way, and it's not enough a confirmation. I know she doesn't want to leave now, more than ever, but we're too fragile. I know she's still the same Ashley, brazen and impulsive. But she doesn't turn back.

The apartment is quiet. It itself amazing, breathing room I'm not used to. I sit down at the counter, feeling out of place, coffee on my lips, chin in my palm. The ticking of her wall clock sifts through the silence. The answering machine beeps.

"Hey, Ash. I got what you needed. Call me back." The voice is female.

Almost by instinct I look at the recorded message number – only it's a hundred and one. She's telling me trusts me not to run by leaving, but why does it feel like a losing battle?