“Is it work?” I asked, gesturing to where he tucked his phone into his pocket. “You should finish it.”
“It can wait,” he said, and I wished he hadn’t. I wished he would delay this longer. Give us more time, but it was the same as my conversation with Laurel yesterday: I knew something that he didn’t, so it was unfair of me to want more.
“What’s up?” he asked, and for a brief second I wondered if I was wrong. If he could sense something was off. He hadn’tclosed the space between us, hadn’t pulled me into his arms like he usually would.
I considered him before I said anything. We wouldn’t be the same after this, I realized. There wouldn’t be stolen days or the hope of them. The secret we’d shared would be in the past, buried, and with it, whatever thread tied us together. But the only way to fix this was to end it here, before anyone else knew, before it could hurt anyone beyond the two of us.
“I don’t think we should tell everyone,” I said, finally. “About us.”
Everett was quiet. “Now?” he asked after a long minute. “Or ever?”
I swallowed, my chest aching. “Ever.”
His lips just parted, and it wasn’t until that moment that I realized there was no better outcome here. The idea of hurting Everett hit me as hard as hurting everyone else, but for some reason, I could convince myself we mattered less. There would be other people, had been other people. What I felt for Everett wasn’t unique. It couldn’t be.
But I saw something in his eyes, just a brief flash, that had a deeply specific, personal corner of my heart fracturing because I knew it so well. It was the thing Laurel always told me I wasn’t addressing: how what my parents had done had shaped me. And it was what Everett’s father had done to him. It was being left behind, having someone choose something else over you time and time again, feeling safe and having the rug ripped out from under you. I was doing it to him now.
I knew Everett too, though, and just as predicted, the hurt was only legible on his face for a second. He brushed it away with a practiced, level expression. “Okay,” he said, but then, “Can I ask why?”
It surprised me—we were so much the same that I’d assumedhe’d want to get it over with quickly, not spend too much time picking over the wreckage. “Because of everyone else,” I said, shaking my head. “Because we would hurt so many people. It’s better if it just dies here.”
“Right.” Everett’s eyes glanced across the ground at my feet before he looked at me again, assessing. Something in the way he watched me raked against my skin, like he was seeing too much. “It’s not just that, though, is it?”
“What?” I asked, irritation starting to spark in me.Just let it go, I wanted to say to him.Don’t make this harder.
“I don’t think this is because of hurting everyone else,” Everett said, not unkindly. “I think it’s because it could hurt you.”
My defenses sprang fully to life then, a familiar shuttering of anything else I might be feeling. It was how I always dealt with things: keeping them in strict order, compartmentalizing. But I’d let Everett spill over into so many areas of my life in the last few years, without even realizing it. Something about it made me angry, that I couldn’t shut him out so easily. “Excuse me?” I asked.
“Come on, Sutton,” he said. “You hate the idea of not being in control. A relationship comes with some measure of that. There’s a chance we both get hurt here, and you might not have a say in that.”
“We aren’t even a couple, Everett,” I snapped, because what he said dug too deep, hit a dead center bull’s-eye in my chest.
“Of course,” he said. “Neither of us do relationships.”
It was too close to what Laurel had said on the boat last summer. It seemed almost like some sort of challenge—one I didn’t want to back down from.
“There’s nothing here to hurt us,” I said. “But there’s a lot to hurt everyone else. The way we’ve been lying.”
“Nothing,” Everett repeated then. “There’snothinghere thatcould hurt you?” When I didn’t say anything, he continued. “The last five years meant nothing to you.”
For a brief, bright moment, my anger faltered, and I could almost feel his hand on my waist as he said it, like he’d closed the space between us and this was all just some stupid joke, some scene we were rehearsing in case anyone else got word of us. We’d kiss, and it would all be fine.
But he hadn’t closed the distance between us. We were still two islands. “Not nothing,” I said. Everett was right about one thing, no matter how little I wanted to admit it, I wished I could control this, but he was a variable I’d never expected. I shrugged a shoulder, said as casually as I could muster, “They were fun.”
“Fun,” Everett said. “Five years of lying to everyone, of sleeping together, of breaking this pact you care so much about—that was fun for you?”
I’d been too focused on Everett to hear the lock of the door turn behind me, but the sound of the door banging open had me jumping, turning to see three of the most important faces in the world to me ranging from shock (Gabe), to something like humor (Davi), and finally, to anger, pure and unfiltered, on Laurel’s perfectly sun-kissed face.
“You’re joking,” she said. I choked, no sound coming out of me. “You two are sleeping together?”
“Were,” Everett clarified behind me, too fast, and I whirled, expecting to find some smug expression on his face but he just shrugged, likeWhat else am I supposed to say?
I wanted to ask when they got there, know how much they heard, but I knew none of that mattered. What mattered was that Everett and I had broken the only real promise we’d ever made, the one we’d all sworn on in this very room, and lied about it.
“I’m so sorry,” I said quickly, turning back to face them.
“You’re unbelievable,” Laurel said, stomping past us into the kitchen, where she set down the bag she was carrying with a loud clink.
