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“There’s that judgey side I love so much coming out to play.”
“You hate it.”
“No, I hate when I’m on the receiving end.” Connor knocked his knuckles against the rubber side of my shoe, drawing me back to him. “You should come tonight.”
I looked into his hazel eyes. In this light, they were definitely green, the different colored flecks easy to get lost in. They almost seemed to glow, beckoning me closer. “I’m helping out at the art gallery tonight. I wouldn’t be able to go anyway.”
“Bummer.” His shoulders drooped briefly before he shifted, leaning against the side of the car and facing me straight-on. “Should we dive into our last love advice lesson?”
It was ironic that my love life had actuallydeterioratedsince the start of all this tutoring, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him. “We should focus on you. Your lessons are more important.”
But Connor wasn’t convinced. He shook his hair out of his eyes and leaned closer, putting a hand on his knee. “Be honest about how you feel. With anything. A relationship with no honesty, no transparency… It’s never going to last.”
Over the course of our relationship, there were definitely things I kept to myself. I never told him about Madison and the cheer squad. We never talked about how I felt after Jozie left. And when it came to things about him, we never talked about anything deeper than surface level.
“Sometimes you need to just be brave,” Connor went on. “Sometimes it’s scary to talk about certain stuff. But you might regretnotsaying something, you know?”
Maybe we should’ve talked about things when we first started drifting apart. Maybe I should’ve started the conversation, been honest with what I’d been feeling. There was no way of knowing whether or not it would’ve made a difference in the end, but it was something I regretted, not being open about things earlier.
We sat so close in the hatch trunk that I could hear Connor’s soft inhale and exhale as he waited for my response, and the overwhelming desire for somethingdifferentstung at me.Be honest with how you feel.Sometimes you need to just be brave. But what happened when you had no idea how you were feeling? What did you say then?
“Thank you,” he said after a beat, voice low enough to nearly get caught in the wind. “For helping me with this. With tutoring. I know I kind of tricked you into it.”
“It wasn’t all bad.”
“So that means it was a little bad?”
I laughed at that, tilting my face up toward the sunlight. It was warm on my skin, a delicate touch made bearable by the accompanying breeze. It was easier to not look at him, to sever the connection his eyes always seemed to swipe me up in. “I shouldn’t have judged you so much in the beginning,” I confessed. “I’m sorry for that.”
A faint tickle grazed the side of my bare arm, and I opened my eyes to find Connor’s knuckles grazing me there. Though it was obviously a casual touch, my skin tingled, mind pretending it was more affectionate than it was. He nodded solemnly. “Likewise.”
It felt like we were stumbling upon the last page in a book that I could’ve sworn would have at least one more chapter. A math equation that I’d been working on for hours only to discover there was no true solution. This was it. The last tutoring session. The last time we’d share a space like this, the last time we’d laugh together. Mrs. Diego would give me a new student to tutor, Connor would play at football games and go to parties, and this would all be a blip in time.
Two people who knew each other’s secrets, fading away to be nothing but strangers.
Sometimes you need to just be brave.
I urged all of those thoughts down deep until they stopped resurfacing. They weren’t helpful anyway. “Okay,” I told him, and then reached out to tap his practice exam. The paper wavered under my touch. “Time to get back to work.”
He looked on the verge of saying something, probably adding more to the one last love tip, but something held him back.Say it,I thought.Take your own advice. Tell me what you’re thinking.
But he ultimately nodded, turning back to his practice exam. “Let’s see where we end up.”
The art gallery’s patrons began dying off the closer it got to the top of the hour, which left me sighing in relief. The gallery had extended its hours this week due to the Brentwood High Spirit exhibit, catering to those who were caught in after school practice and PTO meetings, but ordinary attendees of the exhibits were used to the seven o’clock closing time. However, this week only, Center Inspire would be open until eight, which meant that I would be stuck there until then.
If not longer. Who knew how long Mom would linger? If she had it her way, she’d stick around until the cleaning crew was finished.
Earlier, I’d been helping Mom pass out pamphlets with student artist information and singing the praises of Center Inspire. “Oh, it’s a woman-owned art gallery, the only one of its kind in all of the county,” I’d say, or “Center Inspire has a mix of European artists as well as local—we live to celebrate every success from every walk of life.”
Apparently, when Mom gave me the script to read off of, she didn’t hear how plasticky it sounded.
After my feet got too tired from standing the majority of the night, I’d found a bench near a few student displays and listened to them explain their artwork. It’d been the night designated for them to show their work to their families, so for practically the entire night, Center Inspire was filled with grandparents going ga-ga over sculptures and paintings.
Most of the Brentwood High students had left now, though, and I would’ve bet money that the majority were heading straight for the pre-game party.
Connor would’ve been there by now. I wasn’t sure if Rachel and Ava decided to go—they’d invited me to tag along, but if football games weren’t my scene, parties were a definite no-go.
It didn’t mean that Iwasn’tchecking Brentwood Babble for updates, though, in case Ava decided to post an article without proofing it first. I refreshed the page every ten minutes.
