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Probably a good idea I don’t try to get in touch with Aidan and Cooper …
Because if they knew what was going through my head right now?
They would kill me.
Then again, if they knew I was back in town and didn’t reach out—they’d kill me anyway.
Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.
“You still haven’t answered me.” I try again, because it’s dark, and maybe she’s drunker, now, if that’s possible. She was purposely avoiding the question, and now I’m hanging on the answer. “What have you been up to all these years?”
She drops her chin to her chest and mumbles something.
“What?” I ask.
She exhales and clears her throat. “I thought I told you? I work at Ted’s.”
I stare, trying to find some other meaning of the words. “Wait. You make that crappy pizza?”
“It’s not like it’s my recipe.” Stassi shoots me a look. “Besides, it’s not that crappy.”
“It is. I don’t know how he gets the pizza to be both burnt to a crisp and raw at the same time.”
“Hey, people drive from miles around for our burnt, raw pizza,” she says with a teasing sniff. “Anyway, that’s not all I do. Sometimes I substitute teach at the high school.”
I bite my lip, refraining from showing judgement while silently wondering what the fuck.
She had everything going for her.
Ambitious, confident, and intelligent—the necessary requirements to become a success at anything in life.
“You went to USM, though, right?” I ask.
She nods.
“And you got a degree?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you go somewhere? Do something?”
Her nose wrinkles. “Not everyone can be a doctor, you know.”
But she could’ve been one. She could’ve been anything she wanted to be. And yet, now she’s behind a counter, making the most godawful pizza on Earth.
It doesn’t make sense.
Something had to have happened.
“Weren’t you majoring in STEM or something?” I ask.
She looks at me sideways. “Yeah. I double majored in Chemistry and Math with a minor in Public Relations. How’d you know?”
I probably know more about her than I should. I need to tone that down so I don’t come off like a creep.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I did come back a few times. I think your brothers told me.”
“Mm hm.” She doesn’t buy it. “You always did take an unnatural interest in my goings-on.”
“Me? Nah.”
“Yeah, you did, which I always found to be ironic because you were Mr. Important. Everyone wanted a piece of you. And yet you still had time to write those nasty messages to me.”
“Come on … they weren’t nasty, they were cringey at best.”
“Agree to disagree.”
“We can laugh about it now though, right?”
She peers at me through a fringe of dark lashes, her expression somber as if to illustrate there’s nothing funny about those messages—then or now.
Perspective is everything, I suppose.
“So what the hell’s keeping you here anyway?” I steer the conversation back to the important stuff.
She inhales a sharp breath, her cheeks puffing out as she releases it. One thing I know about Stassi is that she famously doesn’t show a ripple. Not unless someone really gets under her skin. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time she comes off as infuriatingly unbothered.
Before she can answer, we’ve arrived at our building.
I slide out of the backseat and offer her a hand to help her out. She doesn’t take it but winds up stumbling into me anyway.
Wrapping my hands around her waist, I steer her away from the curb so she doesn’t trip, but she brushes me off.
“Don’t,” she says, palms splayed in the air, braced against nothing. “And don’t follow me. You talked me into meeting up with you under false pretenses, so this is where our night ends. Goodnight, Mansfield.”
I stand back as she marches toward the apartment in the far corner of the complex, to a door hidden among snow drifts and drooping pine boughs. From the corner of her eye, she glances back a few times, as if she’s trying to gauge my next move.
“Just so you know, I’m not stalking you,” I call after her. “Since I, uh, live here too.”
Stopping to grab my key from my pocket, I glance at her door. It’s so close I could probably spit on her front doormat if there wasn’t a giant pine tree between us.
Nevertheless, I keep my distance per her request, biding my time as I make my way to my apartment. A minute later, I’m turning the key in my lock, just about to go inside, when I hear her scream.
5
Stassi
“No!” I shout into the icy air, holding the stub of the key in my hand. “No. No. No …”
I pound on the door despite knowing it’s no use. Mad drove up to Bangor to visit family earlier today and she’s not coming home tonight. I look at the crumbling stoop, the welcome mat buried under gray slush, and imagine trying to sleep there. Because right now, that’s my best option—that or Ubering to my parents’ house, but showing up three sheets to the wind on a Sunday night would surely send tears to my mother’s eyes and earn me an hour-long lecture from my father and it's far too late to sit through one of those.
