Being there, pretending to be someone I wasn’t, had been liberating in a sense. The need to let go and have fun was a tantalizing temptation, one that for a few moments I had been fully ready to give in to.

But then I had seen him again, the stranger wearing the baseball cap. He had swooped in and saved the day as though he had been waiting all night for such a moment.

I had felt like an idiot when he kept me from drinking the drug-laced beer. I prided myself on being hypervigilant when it came to unusual situations. It wasn’t like me to leave my drink unguarded.

I wasn’t an idiot, but that night I had been all sorts of stupid. I had been reckless and almost endangered myself by my ignorance.

But mystery man made sure that hadn’t happened.

I should have been grateful he was there. Instead I had felt supremely irritated that I hadn’t been able to take care of myself, and he had basically mocked me for it.

I wasn’t the sort of girl who needed rescuing, yet he had done so twice now.

And I still didn’t know his name or even what he looked like. And I knew that, without a doubt, that was completely intentional.

When he had touched me, it had been deliberate, as though he was looking for a certain kind of response from me. He knew what he was doing by invading my personal space, and he enjoyed making me uncomfortable.

But then he had disappeared, and I hadn’t seen him again for the rest of the night.

I hated to admit that I had spent more time looking for him than I had dancing. I had completely forgotten to look for Renee as well, and it wasn’t until Brooks and I were leaving at two in the morning that I realized I hadn’t seen her all night.

Brooks had been more than a little drunk, so I had to drive us home. Renee was already home by the time I got back to the apartment. I had seen the light on underneath her door.

But I had been out of sorts and feeling strangely shaky, so I hadn’t bothered to find out where she had been. And I hadn’t really spoken to her since.

So her sudden appearance in my bedroom caught me by surprise.

“What?” I questioned dumbly.

“We haven’t spent any sort of time together lately. I thought we could . . . you know, get some dinner and then maybe rent a movie. It’s been a while since we’ve watched Dazed and Confused,” she offered, her pale green eyes meeting mine tentatively.

I knew she was trying. She was reaching out. And I wasn’t one to smack away what she was offering. It hit me hard in that moment how much I missed my best friend. I suddenly needed the open confidences we used to share.

As much as I loved Brooks, he wasn’t Renee.

I closed my Counseling Foundations textbook and gave her a smile. “That sounds great,” I said genuinely. Renee seemed relieved that I had accepted her offer so readily. Perhaps I hadn’t been as accessible as I thought I had been. Could it be that the state of our deteriorating friendship didn’t rest entirely on her shoulders? Perhaps my tendency to shut people out had contributed to the emotional distance between us.

I grabbed my purse, and Renee pulled on her black leather jacket. She jammed her hands in her pockets and pulled out a couple of receipts that I had left behind after wearing it on Saturday.

“Did you borrow my jacket?” she asked me, crumpling the papers and tossing them in the trash.

“Yeah, on Saturday. Hope it’s okay,” I told her. We had always lived by an open-closet policy since we had moved in together, though perhaps I shouldn’t have taken it without permission, given the current state of our friendship.

Renee smiled. “It’s okay. You know you’re always welcome to my clothes. Anyway, this jacket always looked better on you than on me,” she said lightly, and any tension we had been feeling lessened slightly.

“That’s true. I can’t argue with that logic,” I joked, closing our apartment door behind us as we headed down the hallway.

“Where did you go? I thought you planned on staying home on Saturday,” she said.

“Brooks and I headed over to Compulsion. I was hoping to see you there, you know, after you suggested it . . . ,” I ventured, trying to open up a dialogue between us. I instantly noticed the tightening of her jaw and the stiffening of her shoulders.

“We didn’t end up going,” she said finally after a few moments.

“Why? What did you do?” I asked, not sure she would answer me, whether she would think I was being intrusive and shut me down. I never knew what my questions would be met with anymore. Long gone were the days of easy conversation. Renee Alston carried a lot of secrets now, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever know what they were.

Renee smoothed down her hair, a gesture that usually indicated she was upset about something. I looked at her closely and was startled to see that she looked almost gaunt. How had I not noticed how much weight she’d been losing in the last few months? Her once-vibrant red hair was now the dull color of rust. Her clothes were baggy and seemed ready to fall off her slight frame.

She had always been a curvaceous girl. She was a bit on the short side, coming up only to my shoulders, but with an ass and boobs that put mine to shame. And she had always worked what she had. Now it was as though her clothes were swallowing her up. Her shoulders were drooped, and these days her gaze was always trained at the ground.

“We ended up at a party. Some guy Devon knew,” Renee explained, looking at me out of the corner of her eye, most likely watching for a sign of my well-known disapproval of Devon. But I kept my face blank.