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“Want some?” he asked, tipping the thermos her way.
“No, thanks. I’ll be up all night.”
“Looks like you’re up anyway.” He didn’t sound happy about it.
“Hard to sleep knowing you’re out here.” She looked down the street in the direction of the burgundy SUV. “Knowing he’s out here.”
Logan didn’t answer, just took a drink of coffee and stared out the windshield.
She fumbled for something to say, but there was so much history. Too much. She settled for the present instead. “Thank you for being so nice to Leo today, and to Bea.”
He didn’t look at her. “Why wouldn’t I be nice?”
And there it was: the past again, lurking in the shadows of their conversation.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just… a weird situation.”
Now he looked at her, his eyes burning bright with anger. “How so?”
He wanted her to say it, wanted her to acknowledge what she’d done.
It’s not like they hadn’t talked about it before — it had come up when they’d had dinner — but that news had overshadowed everything, a death knell to any hope either of them might have harbored that there might be a future for them. Logan had been hurt and angry, had left in a hurry to hide his pain.
“We have a lot of history,” she said.
“Is that all?”
She wasn’t surprised he called her on the cop-out. She took a deep breath. “What I did… back when we were kids…”
“We weren’t exactly kids,” he said.
She nodded and swallowed the lawyerly reply that rose in her throat.
We were eighteen, not even old enough to drink legally. You expected me to make a good decision about the rest of my life?
“But we were young,” she said. “It’s not an excuse, just an explanation. I needed to get away.”
“You might have told me. Before you actually got away, I mean.” The words were harsh, spat from his mouth like bitter fruit.
“I wanted to,” she said. “I tried. So many times.”
“What stopped you?” he asked.
“Cowardice, mostly,” she admitted. “You and Hawk were always talking about the future, about the things you would do. It felt disloyal to say I wouldn’t be there too.”
“But you knew.” For the first time that night, he sounded like Logan. Her Logan. Not the detached man who’d shown up on her doorstep earlier that evening. “You had to have known. You applied to Duke, waited to hear back, got your acceptance letter. And you never said a thing until the week before you left.”
She looked down at her hands in the darkened car. “I didn’t know how to explain.”
“How about now?” he asked. “Can you explain now? Because we did nothing but talk about the future and — ”
“Youdid nothing but talk about the future,” she shouted. He froze and she took a deep breath, trying to calm herself down. “You and Hawk, you were always talking about the future. All your big plans. You never even asked if I’d be there, Logan. If Iwantedto be there.”
“It wasn’t crazy to assume, seeing as how you never said a word to the contrary,” he said.
It was fair. She’d had a million and one opportunities to tell them — to tell Logan — she wanted to leave California, that she needed to leave California.
But she hadn’t. Not until a week before she left for school. She had a flash of memory: Logan and her at the beach, Logan’s face pinched as he looked out at the water, fists clenched at his sides. The drive home, longer than it had ever been, Logan’s expressionless face as she’d gotten out of his car, the squeal of his tires as he’d driven away, leaving her on the curb for the first time in the history of their relationship.
