Page 25 of Seven Rules for Breaking Hearts

“It just seemed like the obvious target. Not you,” he amended, “the tuba. I didn’t even realize you’d be the one playing it.” He doubled over to catch his breath, and I stopped too, several paces ahead. Between the scraggly foliage on the hillside, the water stretched toward the faint silhouette of the smoggy mainland on the horizon. He straightened up and held his hands in a wide circle in front of his body—the way a non-musician might imagine someone holds a tuba. “They’re … big, you know. And the tuba player is always seated behind the other people.”

“And what had you hoped to achieve, exactly?”

His forehead crinkled. “Making people laugh, I guess.”

I could kind of understand that, considering homecoming pranks weren’t unheard of. And if he said he didn’t mean to target me, then I believed him. “Okay, so the pudding incident. What was that about?”

He winced. “You looked like you were having a bad day. I thought I’d cheer you up. Maybe not the best way to go about it, in retrospect—”

“You tried to cheer me up by giving me mayonnaise instead of pudding,” I said flatly, trying and failing to follow his logic. “What if I was allergic to mayonnaise?”

“You’re not,” he said without missing a beat. I narrowed my eyes. “You used to bring those turkey sandwiches to school.”

“Okay, first off, it’s weird that you even remember that, and second, explain to me again how mayonnaise was supposed to cheer me up?”

He shrugged. “I mean, it distracted you. Do you remember what you were upset about?”

My silence was answer enough. I couldn’t conjure up a single memory of that day outside of the pudding cup. In particular, I remembered feeling completely caught off guard when he had offered it to me—I had assumed he was just passing by my table, but then his Vans had squeaked to a halt on the laminate floor of the cafeteria, and he’d held out a cup of Snack Pack pudding, the foil already pulled back. Hey, do you want this? I opened it before I realized it was tapioca. I haven’t touched it, I swear.

“I am sorry for that, though,” he continued. “I hope you believe me when I say that I have no intentions of involving mayonnaise in any of my attempts to cheer you up in the future. Unless you want me to.” He shot me a roguish wink, which shouldn’t have worked with all the sweat and talk about mayonnaise, but somehow it kind of did.

“Appreciate the offer, but I’d prefer if you left the mayonnaise out of things.”

He inclined his head, looking amused by some joke that I wasn’t sure I was in on. “Noted.”

Our shoes crunched on the gravel as we resumed the hike and an ocean breeze slithered through the dry grass. I took a few healthy swigs from my Gatorade bottle, unease creeping over me. I still couldn’t get a read on him. A big part of feeling in control was already knowing he wanted me, which I didn’t know for sure at the moment. That was the whole reason for Rule Number One, which I’d effectively broken last night when I asked him to hang out, but I hadn’t expected the effect to be so immediate. I definitely followed the rules for a reason. A part of me wanted to chicken out now, come up with some other content for Season Seven, but it was only two weeks. I could handle two weeks, even if that meant two weeks of feeling a little off-kilter. This was good. This meant I’d have something to talk about for the podcast.

“Now it’s my turn to ask you a question,” Declan said after a moment, calling me out of my thoughts. “Why do you go by ‘Go’ on the podcast?”

I waved a hand. “It’s a rhyme thing. Jo and Go. It’s catchy.” It had been Jo’s idea. Actually, I’d always kind of hated the fact that my name was modified to fit with hers and not the other way around. Not that I had any solid suggestions for how the other way around would actually work. But it had always bugged me a little. Like a splinter that had wedged itself into my thumb—a tiny prick of annoyance, not enough to really inconvenience me, so I’d never brought it up.

I took another swig of sangria. Declan was watching me closely, now that we were hiking side by side. “I like ‘Margo’ better,” he said, thoughtful. “It sounds …”

“Old lady-ish?” I suggested.

He shook his head. “I was going to say ‘French.’ ”

“So I take it you’ve Googled me.” Looked like I wasn’t the only one doing a bit of cyberstalking this past week. There was something I could latch on to—an inkling of interest, and a chance that I could take back the reins, steer this whole interaction in a direction that worked for me.

“I’ve Googled the podcast, yes, but so has the rest of our graduating class,” he said in an offhanded way. “A couple of band geeks get super famous for talking about their sex lives, people are going to be curious.”

I arched a brow. “Jo wasn’t a band geek, she just hung out with us.” I wrestled with an odd mixture of emotions. On one hand, I was proud of everything that Jo and I had built together. But beneath that, in this weird and complicated way, I was embarrassed, knowing how much of my life he’d potentially been privy to. There was a difference between strangers listening to my podcast and people I knew listening to me. Social media allowed people from my past to peer into my life through a stained-glass window—rosy-tinted, a blur of shadows and colors, more of a vague suggestion than a clear picture. But in putting myself out there, I had welcomed the voyeurism nevertheless.

“So?” I prompted. “What did you think?”

“I didn’t actually listen to it.”

I deflated like the rental bounce house after someone canceled the party. There went that inkling of interest. “Are girly podcasts beneath you or something?”

“No. It just felt weird.” He shrugged. “Stalkerish.”

From somewhere around the bend ahead came the rumbling of an engine, and we both moved off to the side to make way for another Hummer on a return trip. To my surprise, Declan flagged it down. I thought maybe he was going to ask them for a ride back into town so that he didn’t have to walk. A gruff-looking middle-aged woman was in the driver’s seat. “How far to see the buffalo?” he asked her.

I looked back and forth between them, certain I’d heard wrong. “I’m sorry, the what?”

She waved over her shoulder, back in the direction the Hummer had come from. “They’re a bit farther inland today. You’re probably looking at a day’s hike, maybe two.”

Declan looked crestfallen. “Past the first camp?”