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Beneath his freckles, his face is a mess of angry red splotches. It isn’t cute. It’s fucking infuriating. This close to him, I can see all his freckles, plus a scar on his chin I’ve never noticed before. And I’ve never seen him with facial hair, but now that he’s been out all night, a dusting of auburn is beginning to grow in, and it doesn’t look terrible. Except that it’s Neil, and I despise him—don’t I?—and therefore it does.
“Up until today,” he says, “we only sort of knew each other. I knew you hate it when you don’t get enough votes for a measure in student council and that you like romance novels. But I didn’t know why. I didn’t know about your family or your writing. I didn’t know how much you like sad songs or why you love reading the books you do. And”—he sucks in a breath—“you didn’t know about me either. You didn’t know about my family. Do you know how many people I’ve voluntarily told about my dad?” He shakes his head. “Maybe five? And I trusted you with that. I haven’t trusted anyone with that, not for a long time.”
He’s apologizing. He clearly feels bad about it. Maybe it isn’t so awful that he kept this from me. Maybe we can move past it, keep playing.
The moonlight catches his face, and I can’t deny how lovely it looks.
“We shared some really personal shit,” he says. “Does that not matter at all?”
I’m blushing too. I can feel it. I’m thinking about what we talked about in the library. How it felt safe to have those conversations around him. How I liked playing with him, but more than that…
I wanted to kiss him, and I wanted him to kiss me back. That’s what I wanted.
What I want.
“It does matter,” I say, stepping closer. I don’t want to be at odds with him. The day flashes through my mind: the assembly, my Pike Place Market rescue, arguing over pizza. The record store and Sean Yee’s lab and Neil’s house, the place no one ever goes. My house, then, and the zoo and the library. The library. That dance. Then Two Birds, and singing while scrubbing dishes, and the open mic and how incredible I felt afterward.
The bench.
How much of it was real? What happened at his house, yes, and what happened at mine. But everything else? Before I forgive him, I have to know for sure.
“I just need to know,” I say. “How much of today was real? Because what happened on the bench—we almost kissed, Neil.” That last part, I whisper it.
I didn’t want it to be an almost, I will myself to say. I wanted his mouth on mine and his hands in my hair. It wasn’t something I’d been imagining for months and months. I had no preconceived notions of what it would be like, and for once I wanted to turn off my brain and simply feel.
I don’t know how to explain to him how unusual that is for me.
He turns even redder. “I guess it’s good we didn’t. We just… got caught up in the moment. It would have been a mistake.”
A mistake.
He hunches his shoulders, turning slightly away from me. The shock of learning this was one-sided sends me backward a few paces. A boulder shoved into my chest. So I was played, then. After all these hours, I am still merely a game to him.
Hours. It’s only been hours. A mind can’t change that quickly—and yet mine did. I was so sure his did too.
I force my face not to fall, force my hands not to tremble. My heart, though—that’s the one I can’t control. When I was younger, I never understood it when someone’s “heart sank” in a book. It’s not physically possible, I told anyone who’d listen. Now I know more than ever before exactly what it feels like for a heart to sink. Except it’s not just my heart; it’s my entire body that wants to crumble.
He’s so embarrassed about what happened on the bench that he won’t even look at me, instead immersed in what must be a fascinating dip in the sidewalk.
“Rowan?” he says, as though he wants to make sure I heard him break me.
“Right. Right,” I say with more conviction than I feel. It’s too cold outside, and I hug my arms tight around myself. It doesn’t stop that sinking feeling. It doesn’t stop the pressure building behind my eyes or the way my voice sounds strained and high-pitched. “A huge mistake. Got it.”
“Glad we’re on the same page,” he says, but his words are clipped, and he sounds anything but glad.
“Good thing we came to our senses. I mean, you and me? In what universe would that have made sense?” If I force myself to say it out loud, maybe I’ll believe it. It has to make this hurt less. “The rest of the senior class would have had a field day with it.”
I think about all the moments I was too cruel, the times I pushed him away. If I’d done the opposite, would we be having this conversation? Or would it only be more painful?
“Can we—can we just drop it?” he asks. Stammering. “Please?”
“Sure. Fine.” I kneel down to open my backpack, searching for my keys. I can’t look at him right now. I don’t want him to see that I’m on the verge of crying. He doesn’t need more ammunition.
God, what is wrong with me? Neil McNair wouldn’t have been my perfect boyfriend. Under no circumstances is he the person I should have been with.
My fingers close around cool metal, and I make a tight fist around the keys to anchor myself. Maybe he deserves to win the game after all. He tricked me into thinking I had feelings for him, then somehow turned them real. He’s the true champion of Westview, ensuring this final competition would end with me utterly sunk.
“We only have two more clues,” he says, softly this time. He turns to face me. Fuck. I hope he doesn’t think he needs to treat me delicately now. I’m not sure what would be worse, the teasing when I confessed my ninth-grade crush, or this. “Let’s finish them up, and then we can figure this whole thing out.”
