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“Connor.” My voice was hard. “You should go before it gets any later. I’ll check your work tomorrow.”
Alex looked at Connor, lips parted in puzzlement.
I could hear Connor fold his worksheet back up, but he was hesitant to walk to the archway of the living room. “See you two tomorrow,” he said finally, and I could feel his eyes.
I didn’t look at him as he headed for the front door, and even once we heard it click shut, Alex and I faced off in the silence of my house, waiting for the other to start.
“I’m not mad,” Alex tried to reassure me, but it only made me feel worse.
“Why not? For two weeks, I’ve lied to you about where I’ve been, who I’ve been with—”
“You didn’t, though. You told me you were tutoring, and you were. You were just tutoringConnor Bray.” Alex scrubbed a hand down his cheek, still in awe. “I can’t believe you could keep it a secret this whole time. I don’t know how you did it. Was it hard tutoring him? Was it intimidating?”
His words came like a quick rapid-fire, each one making me feel worse than the last. “Intimidating?”
“Because it’s Connor Bray,” he said, likeduh. “Do Ava or Rachel know? Probably not, right? Ava would’ve put it on her blog. Jeez, they’d freak.”
They’d freak. Strangely enough, I thought of Madison’s reaction. It would’ve made sense if Alex’s reaction had been even a fraction of Madison’s, but it wasn’t. His expression only held confusion, perplexity, like he couldn’t even begin to figure out how Math-Book Maisie was hanging with Hot-Shot Connor Bray. Like I must’ve been intimidated, because Connor was better than me.
It was that mentality that made me hate the athletes at Brentwood High. It was that mentality that had me hating Connor at first until I learned that he didn’t think that way. But Alex…Alex did.
“I think you were right,” I finally got out, releasing a slow breath. I didn’t know how long I’d been holding it, but finally exhaling came as a relief to my lungs, like I’d been holding my breath for years. “I don’t think we are compatible.”
Alex blinked in surprise, recognizing the word. “Are you breaking up with me?”
Much like how I’d felt when Connor said the words Monday at the coffeehouse, my body froze. My first instinct was to deny it, to snatch the words back out of the air. How could I break up with Alex, the first guy who’d trulyseenme? How could I throw away the history stretched out between us?
But my mind was quick to remind me of the longing I’d felt for the brief physical interactions. And I couldn’t go on with Alex when I was having feelings like that with someone else.
“You think I’d be intimidated by a guy like Connor Bray because I’m Most Likely To: Marry A Math Book, right?”
“You know—” He stopped, processed the urgency out of his voice. “You know I don’t care about that.”
“You don’t?” I squeezed my arms tighter around me, wishing I’d kept the blanket. “You cared about the list when you were on it. That’s why we’re together, right?”
Alex tilted his head, the way a dog might after getting a confusing command. “We’re together because I like you, Maisie. I think you’re cool, nice to talk to—”
“You think Rachel’s cool and nice to talk to, right? And Ava?” As soon as I said it, I knew. That was how it was between us—how it had been for a while. There’d been no spark because there’d been noromance. We were essentially two friends who’d given each other a serious label. We hung out, talked about surface level things, but the romance was gone.
“I’ve been doing better, haven’t I?” Alex asked. “We’ve been doing better. I’ve been trying to make us work.”
Alex and Maisie time. That was the first thing that came into my head, but it was quickly overshadowed by the memory of him ditching me at the Wallflower. He’d left me alone without hesitation. He walked away from me like he might’ve walked away from Rachel or Ava, not thinking twice. “Why?” My voice came out quiet. “Why are you just now trying to make things work?”
He glanced around my living room, growing more and more exasperated. “Because we’re good together.”
That was exactly what Jade had said to Connor. “You said we were too different. You said that—”
“I don’t want to be single again!” he burst out, but there was no heat behind his words. He had the good graces to appear embarrassed, though, rubbing his fingers into his eyes. “All right? I didn’t want to go back to being Most Likely To: Never Get A Girlfriend. I thought you were going to dump me after the Wallflower thing, so I just…tried harder.”
The one thing I told myself throughout our relationship, as a sort of affirming mantra, was that if Alex only dated me because of the Most Likely To list, he would’ve broken up with me long ago. Except…that wasn’t the case at all.
A numbness spread through me as I realized the affirming mantra was the equivalent of me claiming that 2+2=5. Now, the truth stood before me, and I could barely recognize it.
What should loving someone feel like?Electric? Safe? Like sunshine? It shouldn’t make me feel less than, right? Shouldn’t leave me sitting alone at a diner. Shouldn’t ask me to change who I was to fit the mold it desired.
Maybe I didn’t know what love felt like, but I’d been telling those three words to him for a while now. They weren’t a lie then, but they’d be a lie now.
“Okay,” he said with a sigh, staring down at his shoes. For a moment, I thought my words were actually hurting him. It was the hunched curve to his shoulders, the way he breathed slowly. “Fine. I guess we can call it quits, then. But I’m the one breaking up with you. If anyone asks, it was my choice.”
