Frowning, the boy felt the need to take a quick glance at his surroundings when she leaned against his arm, just to make sure no one else was around. Thankfully, it was clear, so he didn't need to shake her off. "If I knew, we would either not be having this conversation or I wouldn't be here at all," he answered, biting the wing off his third cookie. Though his sentence had laid out the options. It was either they accepted it and dove in, or cut things off for good. And going back to avoiding her wasn't an option. Really, as he had found out in his years without her, it had never been an option. He couldn't forget about her as much as he stubbornly insisted on doing so. No matter how many times he told himself he didn't need her, he'd still keep an eye on her from afar. He wondered if she had ever known, but he wasn't going to let her know that truth. The truth that, at the end of the day, she was still there, and maybe he couldn't even imagine a world that didn't include her. It wasn't because he hadn't tried to imagine a world without her.
If nothing else, Mitch knew that he could rely on her to be occasionally blunt. She could dance around subjects sometimes, but he was banking on an honest answer. "What do you want from me?" Even if he didn't believe in making decisions based on the opinions or needs of others, he needed to know. It was like he was being suffocated by the realization he couldn't quit her, and he blamed her for it completely. He needed to at least know what she was thinking.