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Azalea nods. Our heads are on the same king size pillow, about a foot of space between our faces. “That was nice,” she says.
“Really?” I ask skeptically. “You’re not going to tell me it was a bad idea?”
She reaches up to brush her hair back over her shoulder, revealing a small hickey at the base of her neck. The caveman in me thumps his chest in satisfaction. “Was it?”
“You said it was. You said I was fucked up—”
“Yousaid that.”
“And you nodded.”
Azalea sighs. She plays with a loose thread on the pillowcase, winding and unwinding it around her pinky. “I don’t want you to get hurt,” she says finally. “I don’t wantmeto get hurt. I can count on one hand the number of people I feel like I can really, truly depend on, Mav. The thought of something coming between us…I can’t stand it.”
“I can’t either.”
“Do you know why Drew and I broke up?”
I stiffen immediately upon hearing the name of the dickhead Azalea dated for most of our sophomore year. “No. You never told me.”
“I told Callie. She wasn’t supposed to tell you, but you know how she lets things slip.”
I’ve always suspected that Callie doesn’tlet things slipas much as shepretendsthat she didn’t mean to share whatever secret she’s spilled. I try not to feel hurt that Azalea asked her to keep something from me specifically. “What happened?”
“I broke up with him,” she says, avoiding my eyes, “because he asked me to stop spending time with you.”
I think back to the night after they broke up, when Callie called and asked me to come over with Kleenex and ice cream. When I got to their apartment, Callie was tossing everything Drew had left there into a grocery sack while Azalea watched. She looked miserable. “But you were so upset.”
“He was my first boyfriend and I’d never been through a breakup before,” she says. “I wasn’t upset for that long.”
“No, you weren’t,” I agree. “But I still always thought he broke up with you.”
Azalea shakes her head. “No. Not at all. He never liked you and me spending time together—”
“Oh, really,” I say sarcastically.
She gives me a look. “Can you blame him? Look where we are now.”
I fall quiet because she has a point. Every time Drew and I were around each other—which happened less and less the longer he went out with Azalea—the atmosphere was uncomfortable.
I like to think that I tried to be civil, but if I’m honest with myself, I know that I could have done better.
I hated that she had a boyfriend who wasn’t me. But more than that, I hated how Drew always kept a hand on her, often sending me hard glares when she wasn’t paying attention. I hated that she wouldn’t hug me if he was around. I hated that he once told her, in front of several of our friends, that her hair would look better if she straightened it.
I just…hated him.
“We fought a lot, toward the end,” Azalea tells me, “and it was mostly about you. I didn’t have feelings for you back then—or maybe I did and I didn’t realize it—”
“Let’s go with that one.”
She gives me a soft smile. “Yeah, well, whatever was going on, he couldn’t handle it. And eventually he told me that if we were going to stay together, I would need to end my friendship with you. So.”
“So?” I want to hear her say it again. To hear that she chose me.
“So I told him that would never happen, and I broke up with him. It was hard for a couple of weeks, but I’ve never regretted it.”
I tug on the comforter trapped beneath her body. Taking the hint, she slips under it, and I pull her close to me. Our foreheads fall together, noses bumping. I trace a finger down her cheek. “It killed me to see you with him.”
“I didn’t know.”
