Page 64 of Fate Fiction

Evan picked up his pace to be beside me and gently bumped me with his hip. “I’ve spent the last few days trauma dumping on you, but I feel like I know very little about you. I know you have a shitty ex-boyfriend, and a penchant for running, but I’m missing the other pieces of Dani. You seem to hold your cards very close to your chest.”

I fiddled with the dangling strap of my backpack. “What’s there to know? I’m really not that interesting.”

“I highly doubt that.”

“I’m dead serious!” I defended my mediocrity with far too much fervor. Evan shot me a glare. “My ex told me that if someone wanted to put a hit out on me it would be easy. My life is very routine.”

“Nothing sparks passion for you? Not even the writing you pretend you don’t do?”

The tips of my fingers went numb. How could I untangle my love of writing from the subject matter? I was quiet for a few seconds, ruminating on the obstruction of truth I’d have to conjure up. It was wrong to lie to Evan, I knew this, but telling him anything that looked like the truth right now would be worse.

“When I write my mind is quiet for once,” I said. A truth. “I’m bad at processing my feelings, so I’m either running from them or writing about them.”

“Like journaling?”

Not at all like journaling. “Something like that,” I laughed uneasily.

“You are an odd one, Dani.”

You have no idea.

“I’ll figure you out,” he jokingly threatened. “I am serious, though, you were not at all like I expected. I was scared you’d want nothing to do with me, and that would’ve made my week very difficult.”

“Why was that?”

“Because you were gorgeous and I wanted to at the very least talk to you. I practically begged Sue to make you eat dinner with me Sunday night.”

Gorgeous.

Gorgeous had heft to it.

Gorgeous was a word people used to describe people like Evan McLeod. I was pretty most days, beautiful sometimes, and hot when the lighting was right. I had never heard the word gorgeous reserved for me in a casual sentence.

My inclination was to believe that every compliment was a lie wrapped in a pretty bow, and this was no exception. Even after we had kissed and had a few moments that may have felt like romance.

“You’re completely bullshitting me,” my knee jerk reaction slipped out.

Evan was visibly frustrated by my resistance, his eyes narrowed into icy blue daggers. “I’m completely not. Can you stop acting like me being interested in you is something impossible?”

When I was with Evan and too preoccupied by affection to think, it was easy, but when things got quiet, or like now when things were becoming verbalized, and therefore, real, it was a harsh reminder that he was still the Evan McLeod. “People like you aren’t supposed to fall for people like me.”

“Who decided that?”

“Everyone? Society? Every TMZ article I’ve ever read?” The words were spilling out of me now. Of course I’d had passing thoughts of the comments and snark pages dedicated to scrutinizing everything about me, and that was aside from the fanfiction.

Evan stopped behind me and grabbed my arm to turn me towards him. “Aren’t I ultimately the one who makes that decision? Something is different about you, Dani, something precious. I know we’re still essentially strangers to one another, and I know this whole thing is moving too fast for it to make sense, but I don’t want to let this go yet. It would be foolish of me to.”

There it was. My own romantic monologue.

Something I’d watched in romcoms, period dramas, and of course, on Thorndown. They were words I could have written. No writer had handed Evan a script. It was all him, steeped in honesty.

“Yes, but—” I’d lost all sense of reality now, I was grasping for reasons I could make this come to a grinding halt. My secret hung over my head like a dark storm cloud, heavy with rain.

“But what?” he remarked.

But everything. Everything about this was wrong, horribly wrong. I didn’t want to be falling for him like this, I didn’t want him to say these sweet romantic words. I didn’t want to be here with Evan because with every passing moment I knew that it was going to hurt more and more when it ended.

“I’m worried this is a passing phase because I’m a warm body in close proximity to you,” I spit out, fingers trembling. The woods surrounding us had been quiet, like the birds and trees were eavesdropping on our vulnerability.