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“You gave me the big room and took me out and made me feel pretty and sent me presents—” I ran out of breath and was relieved since my voice had taken on a pitch even I couldn’t stand.
“For the fun of it,” he said, looking a bit smug about throwing my own words back in my face.
“If toying with my emotions is your idea of fun, then you’re really fucking twisted,” I said. “Because you couldn’t jerk me around more if I were on the end of a yo-yo.”
“I’m sorry if you feel I’ve led you on,” he said, his voice devoid of warmth.
I covered my face with my hands. I needed to think. Needed to disappear. I took a deep breath and heard him lift his beer and take a sip, heard the pizza box shift, heard him tear open another packet of chili flakes. Pull it together, Maddy. The crazier you act, the saner he looks. I took another slow breath and dropped my hands, finding Quinn right where I left him, eating pizza like the walls weren’t caving in around us. “What do you want from me?” I asked, telling myself that I would hear him out, that I would respect whatever he said.
“I want you to move on.”
My heart couldn’t have sunk faster if it had been tied to rocks and thrown into a river.
“I can’t be the guy you need me to be.”
“I’m not trying to change you,” I said, my eyes brimming with tears as much for the fact that he was hurting me as for my embarrassment over how terribly I’d misread the situation.
“You already have,” he said, his tone laced with gruff resentment. “And it’s fucking up my life.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was as if I’d fallen through to a parallel universe where we weren’t happy. “You think I’m the bad guy here?”
“No,” he said. “But I don’t think you’re the good guy either.”
I wracked my brain for what I might’ve done to alienate him, but I came up short. I hadn’t stalked him, hadn’t cramped his style. I’d never pretended to have a headache when he jumped my bones or asked him to put a label on this thing between us. But why would I? For the last few months, there was nothing I wanted more than to explore the connection I had with him. I wanted that more than sleep, more than food. I wanted him to be happy. And not just with me but…and then it hit me. “Oh my god.”
“What?” he asked, as if he, too, noticed the lightbulb over my head.
“You’re the crazy one.”
He froze, his pizza crust inches from his lips. “Pardon?”
“All this time I thought women were losing their shit over you because they had screws loose, but you’re the one who’s unhinged.”
“I’m not crazy,” he said, deadpan. “I just don’t care.”
“Insisting you don’t have feelings doesn’t make it true.”
“Says you.”
“Yeah.” I rolled my shoulders back and straightened in my chair. “Says me. And you know what else I say?”
He rolled his eyes like I was some sort of schoolmarm about to lecture him.
“I say you do care about me.” I swallowed the nerves threatening to clog my throat. “So you should stop pretending that you don’t because it’s unbecoming. Not to mention total bullshit.”
“Of course I care about you,” he said, his tone still harder than I wanted it to be, than I needed it to be. “I just don’t like myself with you.”
My breath hitched like he’d plunged a knife into my stomach, but no more sound escaped my parted lips. What was there to say? Telling him I felt the opposite would only make me feel more weak and pathetic than I already did. I stared at him, blinking as the taste of bile fouled the back of my tongue.
“I never meant to jerk you around,” he said, perhaps clocking the horror in my eyes.
I rose from my seat, desperate to increase the space between us. “I’ve been falling for you, and you knew it.”
“Well, unfall.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“Whatever.” He waved a hand through the air like my pain could be as easily dismissed as a fruit fly.” My point is, you shouldn’t delete Tinder for me or anything.”
