He took a step back so I could get out of the car. “I skipped book club,” he said in a flat tone. Too flat. “I wanted to surprise you.”
He skipped book club. Blasphemous for Jamie. Since he’d started going, Jamie hadn’t missed a single Wednesday. I reached for Jamie’s hand, winding my fingers around his cold ones. They didn’t return the grip. “He was just—dropping me off,” I told him, trying to speak with my eyes.
“He had to hold your hand to do it?”
“That—that wasn’t?—”
“What it looks like?” Jamie finished, a small crease beginning to form between his brows. “Funny how that keeps happening.”
Panic began to creep in at the coldness in Jamie’s voice, because I’d never heard him talk like that before. Even when we’d argued about college the other day, he’d been angry, but notcold. Icy. Hurt.
I heard Dalton’s car door open, but Jamie didn’t look over at him. “Theo’s sick?” Jamie murmured, the words barely lilting as a question. “Because he didn’t look like it inside.”
The lie I’d told the twins so I could prep for my grand confession. This was going from bad to worse. “Y-You were inside?”
“I’ve been here for over anhour, Daisy.”
My stomach dropped.Over an hour. A part of me was afraid of what the kids told him—that their sisterblew up at them earlier?—and the other part was afraid of what it meant, that he’d been waiting for me, only to find me sitting with the one boy I’d sworn I was over.
Yeah, definitely from bad to worse.
“Have you been hanging out with him?” For the first time, something hard dripped from Jamie’s tone. “And you didn’t want Nell or me to find out, so you lied?”
“No.” I gripped his hand tighter, but he barely reacted. “That’s not it. It was—just this once?—”
“You guys are playing this off really well,” Dalton said from behind me, his voice amused. “Almost like a real couple.”
The words did exactly what Dalton wanted them to—they ruined everything. Jamie’s eyes, finally, slowly, lifted from me to Dalton on the other side of the car, and I watched as a shadow passed over his gaze.
Things went from worse to unfixable.
Jamie looked back to me. “You told him.” The words were filled with something final. Not a question.
“No! No, I didn’t!”
Jamie’s response, though, was all the confirmation Dalton needed. “I’ll admit, you did put on quite the performance. Jamie, does Columbia have a theatre program? Or only NYU?”
“Shut up.” I whirled around to glare at Dalton, finding him with his arms folded over the roof of the car. His expression was smug. “We—we weren’t faking it. It was real?—”
“I told you, Daisy. You don’t have to use him to get myattention.” Dalton tilted his head a little. “You’ve always had it.”
Jamie’s hand shifted in my grip, like he was about to pull away. “Would you justget lost?” I demanded, voice cracking through the air.
Dalton’s grin only widened, but he straightened. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said, sliding back into the driver’s seat before I could tell him he was still blocked.
Jamie stared wordlessly as Dalton reversed down the driveway, his expression still flat. Unreadable. Scary. A pit formed in my stomach as I tried to guess where his head was at. If I could only know what he was thinking, I could fix it. As Dalton’s taillights disappeared down the street, I swallowed hard. “Let me start from the beginning, okay? I—I got into an argument with Mom, and the kids, and I just—I needed space.”
“And you called him.” Jamie looked down at our hands, as if wondering why I hadn’t yet let go. “Not me.”
“You were going to book club, and I?—”
“You think I wouldn’t ditch book club for you? You think I wouldn’t throw everything away for you?” He inhaled sharply and let the breath out slowly. “You didn’t want me. You wanted him.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to reorient myself in the narrative Jamie was building. It was half right, but so wrong. “I didn’t want him,” I insisted. “I—I wanted to ask him how I’d handled things last year. I wanted to ask him why this year is so much harder.”
“I was here last year, too, Daisy.”
But I needed to understand my feelings, I thought,pinching my lips shut.I needed to find out that I was truly over him.
