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“I will.”
“In fact, how about I help you?”
“H-how… are you going to help me?
“How about I take work off your plate?” he offers, his eyes penetrating.
“What?”
“That should help your grades, shouldn’t it?”
I take a few seconds to simply breathe. Although I don’t think I’m successful because my words come out strangled. “Are you… Are you firing me?”
He nods his head. “I am.”
My belly clenches and my mouth parts. “Is that…” God, there’s so much pain that I can’t stop my eyes from tearing up. “Is that why you came here? To fire me?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t… You can’t… I h-haven’t done anything.”
And it’s been hard.
To keep everything inside. To keep my promise to him.
To pretend that nothing ever happened and this is how… This is how he treats me?
This is how he…
“But I did,” he says.
“What?”
He gets closer to me, putting his hand on the wall, leaning over, and I swear I feel him breathe out. As if he was holding his breath and now that he’s close to me he can breathe.
Or maybe I’m just projecting.
Because even though he dealt such a blow to me just now, it feels like I can breathe after two whole weeks. Because I’d stopped breathing the moment he’d dropped me off at my house after our night at the cabin.
“I lied,” he tells me.
“A-about what?”
His eyes move from one end of my face to the other. From the top of my head to the bottom of my chin; from the side of one cheek to the other. And he does it over and over until I’m sure that I must be ingrained in his brain.
Burned into his memory.
Only then does he tell me.
“I said that I’d done it before. That I’d been in love before and that it wasn’t worth it. But turns out I lied. Turns out, whatever it was, it wasn’t love.”
Despite myself I can’t help but ask. “With her? Sophie’s m-mom?”
“Rosie. Her name’s Rosie.”
“Oh.”
“And yeah.” He swallows, his eyes still restless and all over my face. “I thought I did. I thought what I felt for her was love. Because that’s what I wanted, see. Always. I wanted love. I wanted to find someone who… accepted me. After growing up the way I did,wedid, I guess that’s all we ever wanted. Me, Cami and Lu. And by the time I met Rosie, they’d both already found their person. They’d found what they’d been looking for and I…”
