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He stares at me with sad and guilty eyes.
I back away. “Why are you here?”
He rakes his fingers through his hair. “Can I come in? I need to explain everything.”
“I don’t think—”
“Please, Chloe. I’m so sorry I hurt you. Just let me explain.”
My eyes lower to the floor before meeting his again. I want to say no. I should say no. Hehurtme.
But at the same time, I want to hear what he has to say. I want to understand why he did it.
“Um, sure.”
“Thanks.”
I enter the living room and sit on the sofa. He hesitates in the doorway. After taking in a deep breath, he walks inside and lowers himself on the recliner.
We stare at one another. The minutes tick by.
“Chloe…” Liam’s body shakes. He wrings his fingers in his lap. Then he lets them drop to his sides. “Uh…” He clears his throat and stares at the floor. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for things to get so out of hand. I just thought…” He releases a frustrated breath. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
I don’t say anything as I keep my gaze on him.
Still staring at the floor, he shifts in his seat. “I’ve had a crush on you for years.” He shifts in his seat again. “I was scared to tell you how I felt. I knew you only saw me as a friend. But with every passing day, my feelings for you grew stronger. And one day, I just couldn’t take it anymore. So I…”
He sighs and rubs the back of his head. “I guess I wanted to find out if you had feelings for me. So I created Mr. Love. If you liked what he said—or rather, if you likedhim—I thought it would give me the courage to confess my feelings to you.” He shakes his head. “But it just made it worse. You thought Mr. Love was this amazing expert on romance, and I couldn’t reveal that it was me. Boring, loser Liam who’s never had a girlfriend. I thought…” He rubs his forehead and glances at me for half a second before returning his gaze to the floor. “I thought you would be disappointed. That the person you thought so highly of was just silly old me.”
He laughs bitterly to himself. “With every newspaper issue, I promised myself I would tell you the truth. But you got more interested in him. I felt like such a fraud.” He rolls his eyes. “What am I saying? Iama fraud.”
He releases a shaky breath. “A little more than a month ago, I knew that it was too late to tell you the truth about Mr. Love. So I decided to write you an anonymous letter. I wanted to see how you would react. Whether you would like him or think he’s a major dork. I thought that if you liked him, it would be easier to tell you how I felt. But like with Mr. Love, it was harder. Actually, it wasmuchharder. Because you really liked him, and I thought…” He slowly raises his eyes to me. “I thought you would be super disappointed if you knew your secret admirer was me. You envisioned this charismatic, confident romantic guy, and I’m…not that.”
The words are bursting off my tongue. That I would have been happy if my secret admirer wasn’t charismatic or confident. I just wanted him to be himself. His true, honest self. But he was the opposite of that.
Liam’s gaze drops back to the floor. “And it just got worse and worse. I tried to end it after Willow hacked into the security system and saw Derek Chen. I didn’t want to hurt you by ghosting you, but I knew it had to stop. It seemed like the perfect opportunity. I thought maybe you would forget him and move on.” He shakes his head at himself. “That was such a cowardly move. I’m sorry, Chloe. I’m a major coward.”
My mouth opens, but I have no idea what to say.
“I thought things were over between us,” he continues. “But then you wrote me a letter after theSwords and Legendsconvention. I didn’t want to write back to you. I wanted to end things, to stop stringing you along.” He hangs his head. “But I didn’t want to hurt you. You wrote such a sweet letter and I had to respond.”
“You could have told me the truth then,” I whisper.
He sighs, rubbing the back of his neck. “I didn’t tell you because I thought that would crush you.” He wipes the corner of his eye. “I can’t explain it, but he felt real. Like the version of myself I wanted to be but could never be. A guy who’s confident and romantic and can sweep you off your feet. He feltrealto me. This is going to sound messed up, but I was jealous of him. I was jealous when your eyes lit up every time a letter fell out of your locker. I was jealous when you kept daydreaming about him during class. I was jealous that you were swooning over his terrible poems.” He scoffs. “I was jealous of a guy who didn’texist. I really am messed up.”
The room is quiet.
Finally, I say, “You were so against him. You made him out to be some creep.”
Liam shrugs. “I didn’t want you to find out the truth. At least not in the beginning. Later on, I just lost control of the situation. I guess…I guess I was testing what could be if I wasn’t me.”
“But the real you is amazing,” I say. “You didn’t have to invent an alter ego. Liam Hastings is perfect just the way he is.”
He shakes his head. “No. You deserve so much better than that.”
I wish I could tell him he’s wrong. I accepted him wholeheartedly as he was. I loved him for who he was. Now, though? I have no idea how I feel.
“I’m not sure if Willow told you this, but after you discovered that Mr. Love and the secret admirer were the same person, she tracked him down. She found his address. The Hastings’s residence. She figured out it was me.”
