Page 44 of Seven Rules for Breaking Hearts

Margo: Hey, so, hypothetical question

Jo: Shoot.

I’d already typed out the first half of a message—say a guy refuses to have a one-night stand—but my thumb hovered over the send button before highlighting the message and deleting it instead. Jo would see right through it, and she would want to know more, and I wasn’t in the mood to be interrogated about the elevator kiss, or my feelings, or anything else.

Margo: Would it be totally bummy if I wore jeans instead of a dress?

Jo: It’s the cake tasting, not the actual wedding. Just make sure you’re photo ready

Shit. I almost forgot we were supposed to be taking pictures for Castaway Catalina’s website today. I checked the time and did some quick math in my head. If I started now, I probably had enough time to make myself somewhat presentable before leaving the hotel. I dug my makeup bag out of my luggage and set to work.

Half an hour later, I bumped into Jo in the stairwell—there had been an out of order sign slapped on the elevator, which meant either Declan had called the front desk last night or someone had found it parked on the third floor early this morning, because I definitely hadn’t remembered to call.

Jo frowned at my outfit. “Are those my jeans?”

“No,” I said. Yes, but she had bagged them up for donation the last time the Salvation Army was in the neighborhood, and they were perfectly good jeans. A comfortable boyfriend style that she’d complained were too long for her legs, but on me, they were a perfect ankle cut. Technically, they were mine now.

“Huh.” She didn’t look entirely convinced, but she kept walking. “Weird. I guess all jeans sort of look alike, don’t they?”

“Leather jackets, too, when you think about it.” I may or may not have dug a brown leather moto jacket out of the bag as well. Studded, artfully distressed. Not really Jo’s style, but it would’ve been a shame to let it go to waste.

She gave me a funny look and I whipped out my phone to Google whether taking items out of someone else’s donation bag qualified as stealing. We emerged into the bright and airy hotel lobby. Morning sun streamed through the wide windows, gleaming off the polished tile floors. “Oh, good,” Jo said. “At least one of the boys made it down here in a timely manner.”

At the mention of boys, plural, my head whipped up. Sure enough, Declan was standing in the lobby on his phone, dressed in a hooded NASA sweatshirt and a pair of joggers and looking like he hadn’t gotten much sleep. And to think I was worried about jeans looking bummy. I grabbed the sleeve of Jo’s blouse to stop her walking ahead of me. “What’s he doing here?” I hissed.

“What, Declan?” she asked innocently, with a glance over her shoulder at where he was standing by the sliding glass entrance, still glued to his phone and blissfully unaware of our presence. “I invited him.”

“Well, uninvite him.”

Her brow creased. “Why? I thought he was, you know, part of the plan.”

“Yes, but—” I had no interest in delving into the specifics of everything that had happened last night. I didn’t need unsolicited advice and I didn’t want to tell her that I was bailing on the plans for Season Seven. It wasn’t that I cared whether she’d approve or not; as far as I was concerned, I was only giving her a say out of courtesy. “I don’t want to be seen with him in public too often. You know, to keep things under wraps.”

“Oh, that’s not going to be a problem.” She dismissed my concerns with a wave of her well-manicured hand. “I thought it might generate a bit of interest if we leak a few pictures of you guys together before Season Seven. You know, get people talking.” She held her hands up like she was envisioning the trending topics on Twitter. “ ‘Hot mystery guy spotted on Margo’s arm prior to the wedding. Who is he? A boyfriend? A wedding date? A summer fling?’ ” She winked. “They’ll have to tune in to Season Seven to find out.”

I closed my eyes, trying to shut out the image. It didn’t matter that I had planned to use pictures with Declan to do exactly that. It sounded ten times worse, somehow, coming out of someone else’s mouth. Speaking it into existence. I exhaled through my nostrils. “But I don’t want him in the pictures,” I said firmly. “Please tell him to go back to his room.”

When I opened my eyes, Jo had taken a step back. She looked me up and down with a frown, as though really seeing me for the first time. “Dude, are you sure you’re feeling okay?”

“I’m fine,” I lied. “It’s just that he doesn’t know about the plans for the podcast, you know? I don’t want to risk him finding out.”

“Chill out. I’ve got it covered. Remember how Renee told him he has a good face for advertising or whatever? Well, he’s under the impression that she asked for him to be there, and Renee’s under the impression that she’s supposed to shut up and not ask questions about what’s going on between the two of you. It’s all part of the new social media calendar I’m working on.”

“Aren’t you busy planning a wedding?” I asked, but she was already marching toward Declan, full steam ahead.

“It’s called time management,” she said over her shoulder. “Maybe you’d know about it, if you spent less time going through my Goodwill bags.”

I pressed my lips together and hurried along behind her. “It was the Salvation Army bag.”

“Morning,” Declan said when he finally looked up from his phone. I pretended not to hear him. “Peter’s waiting in the golf cart.”

“He’s awake?” Jo asked. “He didn’t answer my text, that little—”

In the blink of an eye, she was out the door, leaving me and Declan alone in the lobby. For a long, painful moment, we stood there—him looking at me, me looking anywhere but him. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for. An apology, maybe, but then again, I wasn’t sure what I was expecting him to apologize for that I wasn’t equally guilty of. Rejecting me, though that didn’t exactly warrant an apology. People were allowed to reject other people. I was admittedly a little confused about how we’d gone from making out in an elevator to shouting at each other outside our rooms, but I had no idea how to address that. I’d never done this before. The morning after … after a whole lot of nothing, really. Under any other circumstances, I would have up and disappeared.

I stared at an abstract black-and-white painting of what I thought was maybe a horse. Or maybe it was a seahorse. The walls of the hotel lobby were vaguely ocean-themed and not very interesting. I could only get away with looking at them for so long before I’d have to face the music.

“Look,” Declan said after what might’ve been the longest moment of my life, “about last—”