For someone whose mere presence put me on edge, he had a way of also easing my anxiety—namely by distracting me so much I didn’t have time to think about anything else. A twist of unease tightened inside me. I didn’t like my contradictory reactions to Asher. I preferred to sort my emotions into separate boxes—black and white, good and bad, alphabetized and color-coded. But when I looked at him, I was a muddled canvas of gray. I hated gray.
