I always put my interest in him first.
Right now —
Lucy just dropped a tank of gasoline on that fire.
It’s almost like the moment you’ve been waiting for your entire life is finally in reach, and you don’t know what to do with it. You don’t know how to act. You don’t know how to feel. You don’t know whether to run toward it or run away from it. You don’t know whether the moment is real or whether you have, in your years of waiting for it, manufactured a version of it that’s going to crumble the instant you reach for it.
I wish I could turn back time and reframe the last few years of my life.
I wish I could go back to fifteen and tell the girl who got called stalker in front of his friends that he didn’t mean it. I wish I could go back to seventeen and tell the girl falling asleep with her hand on his chest that he was going to leave at five in the morning, but he was going to feel it, and she was never imagining it. I wish I could go back to nineteen and tell the girl sending him a text message that he was, in fact, thinking about her too.
Mila and I were so convinced of the opposite.
And right now, in my living room with my new friends looking at me, I can’t believe how wrong we might have been.
Mila knows.
I’m just staring at her, and she’s staring back. I tune the girls out, and I keep trying to apply the math.
One plus one doesn’t equal eight.
How the hell is this happening?
I was done with him. For good. And now, there’s a searing hot emotion in my throat that is begging to be released. I can’t release it here. Not in front of these girls.
“Mila,” I murmur.
She nods, so I stand.
“Where are you going?” Mara asks when Mila stands up.
“We just need a second.”
We walk into my bedroom in a rush. Once we’re inside, I close the door and turn to her.
“What thefuck?”
“What thefuck,” she says back.
“No, seriously. What thefuck, Mila?”
I start pacing. My hands don’t know what to do with themselves. I have them in my pockets. I have them out of mypockets. I have them at my throat. I have them in my hair. I have them at my face.
“Do you really believe that?”
She shakes her head. “That’s hard to believe.”
“It can’t be real.”
She shakes her head again, agreeing with me. “No. How can it be?”
I stop pacing and turn to her. I almost shout it. “Right?”
Mila sits on my bed and shrugs. “Maybe we were wrong. Maybe he was a dick to you because he really liked you. I mean––” She lifts her hands up. “He did sleep with you.”
“Yeah, but you and I both said he did that hoping I’d leave him alone.” My voice has gone high. I sound hysterical. “Right? Like he just wanted to give me what he thought I wanted, and then he disappeared.”
She takes a moment to think.
