I don’t see Alex again until the following night.
It’s eleven o’clock when a fist knocks heavily on the door. I’d been lying in bed dwelling on how much work the greenhouse needs, and how I might not get the chance to use it. The abrupt noise has me jumping out of my skin. I already know who’s knocking.
I open the door. He stares at me, haunted and transfixed, almost as if he sleepwalked here and can’t believe where he’s woken up.
“You are my worst nightmare,” Alex says. Then he moves past me into the house. Falls onto the couch.
I turn, processing this. “No, sure, come right on in.”
“I wouldn’t be here if I had anywhere else to go. I slept in an armchair in my cousin’s room at the inn last night, but he found himself more attractive company for tonight.”
He could certainly go home. Oreton isn’t that far away. I’m about to point this out, temper rising, when he mumbles, face buried in a pillow: “Why do you think I haven’t been back to town since I left for college? The worst thing that could happen to me would be running into you while you’re with someone else.” He laughs tiredly. “Figures.”
He pulls the strawberry blanket over himself and doesn’t say anything else.
I stomp over to my bed, switching off one of the lamps. Before I turn off the other, I glance back at him. His eyes are closed, brows lowered as he wills himself into unconsciousness. I almost take pity on him, but then I think about his parting words before he peeled off in his truck.
I march back over, grab the pillow from beneath his head, and bring it down over his back. His eyes fly open. “How dare you say that I dumped you,” I snap. “How fucking dare you, Alexander King.”
He straightens, twin spots of red flaring on his cheekbones. “Me,” he returns, low and deadly. Stabs a finger into his chest. “Me? How dare you.”
I’m so mad that my mental functions begin to shut down, feet carrying me in a rote pattern back to bed. He stands up, brutally outraged, as if I’m the one with the audacity here, and he’s standing over me in an instant, peeling the blanket back.
“Get away from me,” I seethe. “How dare you make me love you like that, then act like the breakup was all my doing.”
“You were the one so scared we’d break up that you said we should get married, and then at the first sign it would be a challenge you left me anyway.”
“Me? You’re the one who ended it.”
“The fuck I did!” he yells. “Do you have any idea how badly it destroyed me to see how fast you moved on? It had never. I never. I still . . .” He lifts his hands to his head as if to fist his hair in clumps, then drops them because there’s nothing to yank.
“Your texts,” I throw back at him.
“I apologized for those texts. I was spiraling when I sent them.”
“So was I!”
We’re both breathing heavily.
“Here is what happened, and correct me if I’m wrong. Which I’m not,” he begins, endeavoring to keep his tone measured. “We weren’t final on where we’d go to school. You suggested we get married because you thought it would make it harder for us to break up if we found the distance difficult. Then you changed your mind. Left town after a half-assed explanation. Is that right?”
“You weren’t excited about getting married. I was doing you a favor.”
“We were eighteen years old!”
“I know, I know.” I cross my arms, irate with myself. “I don’t know what I was thinking. It felt like I . . . I freaked out because I thought I was going to lose you, so I suggested we get married, and I thought you’d react differently. With more excitement.”
“I don’t think my reaction was all that bad?” He’s moving around the room, dazed. “I wasn’t jumping up and down with euphoria, but, Romina, the logistics of that—I was thinking about the cost, where we would live, whether I could give you a nice enough wedding, whether you really meant it. It would’ve been one thing if you’d told me you wanted to marry me when we were older, more stable, when everything was fine, but that’s not where we were. You were speaking from a position of fear.”
“I meant it.”
“If you were allowed to mean it, how could you accuse me of not meaning it when I said I’d make it happen? If you meant it, how could you turn around and take it back?”
“Because I realized I’d pushed you into getting engaged!”
“You did not.” He bends forward, digging his hands into his eyes. I think he’d like to hit a wall. “I knew why you asked to get married. I knew you were disappointed when I wasn’t immediately ecstatic. But I didn’t have to be talked into it. I’d already known that I was going to end up marrying you someday. I didn’t plan on it being so soon, but I loved you, I would’ve done anything you wanted—”
“Exactly,” I interrupt, getting heated. “That right there. You would’ve done it because I wanted it.”
He makes an animalistic noise. “You’re not hearing me.”
“Yes, I am. You were right to have been hesitant at first. I was offended, I was hurt, but then I realized that was my pride talking. I needed to be more pragmatic like you. Getting married wasn’t the solution.”
“There were better ways to deliver that revelation other than ‘I’m calling off the engagement,’ ” he throws back.
“Your mom was right. We were too young, and you would’ve ended up dropping out of school. You were considering it. Kept mentioning maybe you’d like to go into construction instead—”
“I had been thinking about doing that, anyway.”
“No, you weren’t.” The tension in here is so tight that I open the door to release some of it. Before I can storm out into the garden, he blocks the doorway with an arm across the frame.
“Oh, please,” he spits sarcastically. “Romina, I would’ve picked up the sun with my bare hands and moved it if you didn’t like the position of your shadow, but consider that not everything is about you. I was genuinely torn between devoting so much of my life to school, to a career that frankly was starting to scare me, or going down a different road, one that required fewer years of school, that allowed me to work with my hands in a more personally satisfying, less life-and-death way, that could support us faster, and if you don’t believe that, you’re being purposefully obtuse. Am I a doctor? Am I a doctor right now? Hm?”
“Don’t you hm me.” My hands are fists. “Oh, I hate it when you hm me.”
He snakes an arm around my waist, faster than I can draw a breath. Brings me flush against his body.
“You’re mad because you went and became a martyr so that I could attend OSU. Then I blew up your false version of reality when I told you I quit med school. I bet that just eats you alive, doesn’t it?” His voice is so low, so heavy that when words fall from his mouth, they immediately hit the floor. His eyes are ferocious, black. I can’t hold myself upright; he squeezes tighter to pick up my slack. “That you dumped me, thinking it would force me to do what you thought was best for my future, so eventually you could say you did the right thing. Guess what? You can’t, because you didn’t. Breaking up with me was a mistake, and you know it. We could’ve been together the whole time. I finished my bachelor’s just to have a degree—which I could’ve gotten at Hocking, by the way—and hated med school. Absolutely fucking hated it. Easiest decision in the world to quit.”
I flinch, but he isn’t done.
“I moved to Oreton to join a buddy’s renovation business, then got into carpet installation for a while before I started putting up and fixing roofs. Which I like doing. You didn’t factor into any of those choices, by the way.”
“I didn’t break up with you,” I tell him, curving back around to the beginning of our dispute. “I ended our engagement.”
“Same thing.”
“It was not. Right there—that’s your whole issue.” My chest aches. “You wouldn’t listen when I tried to explain—”
“Where’s Trevor, anyway?”
“What?”
It takes me a second to figure out what he’s talking about. My bed is empty because Trevor and Teyonna are out late canoodling somewhere.
He’s got me all mixed up, unable to lie. “It’s late. I’m not arguing with you right now.” I shut the front door, then march back to my bed. Switch off the remaining light. “Good night.”
His voice is close in the darkness. “Where is he?”
“Go to sleep.”
“You don’t know? It’s nearly midnight.”
“I’m not his keeper. He’s allowed to have a life.”
Alex mutters his way to the couch. Bumps into a table.
“Anyway,” I continue, once I’ve heard him tussle a throw blanket from the back of the couch over himself, “you were so irrational when I said we shouldn’t get married, you were all ‘You’re gonna regret this, you broke my heart, if you come crawling back I won’t have you—’ ”
“I did not say that!”
“Paraphrasing.”
“Exaggerating. Because you can’t stand that this might’ve been your fault, too. I’ll admit that I shouldn’t have sent those texts. I know they pushed you away. But I was hurt, Romina. You’d broken up with me.”
“You keep saying that, but I did not. I only broke off the engagement. We still could have dated, you idiot, I tried to tell you that! Why did it have to be marriage or nothing when marriage had only been on the table for two seconds? But no. You didn’t want to listen, and immediately started throwing out all the stuff I’d ever given you.”
After I told him that we shouldn’t get married, he purged himself of everything that reminded him of our relationship. CDs of playlists he burned for us, notes I’d written him, the empty container of a heart-shaped box of chocolates from Valentine’s Day, the papier mâché dog I made in art class, a tribute to Lacy, his sweet old childhood dog who’d passed away over Christmas break. And, theatrically enough, even his yearbook that I’d signed and decorated. I remember pulling our junior yearbook off his shelf once and it falling directly open to the page with my picture on it, having spent its life opening to that page so many times that it remembered what the viewer wanted to see.
I was out walking with Luna when I saw him toss it into the dumpster next to his house. My sister started telling him off—which, maybe it wasn’t her place to do so, but she is a very protective big sister—and Alex had never looked at me that way before: like a wounded animal, like I was the enemy who’d shot him in the leg. Later, he tried to call me, but I turned my phone off.
“I dug all of it out of the dumpster later, and believe me, I had regrets. You moved away without talking it out,” he counters.
He came by my house the next day wanting to apologize, miserable, dark half-moons under his eyes, while I was packing my car to go stay with my great-aunt in Cuyahoga Falls. I refused to talk to him, wouldn’t tell him where I was going. He watched me drive away, and that was that.
I feel his emotions pumping into the air. He falls silent for a while, long enough for my pulse to calm. But then he says, startling me: “You posted that picture.”
“That wasn’t what I made it look like.” I might as well admit it, now that so much time has passed and it doesn’t matter, anyway. I can’t pretend I don’t know which picture he’s referring to—I posted it specifically to make him mad: Me kissing the cheek of an older boy with cheekbones as sharp as talons. I’d captioned it Muah! xoxo
“What do you mean?”
“It was just some random guy I saw at Hocking. I asked if he’d take the picture with me. He said sure. Didn’t even care to know the details. I think he might’ve been high.”
Alex is silent for a full ten seconds, then thunders, “Are you kidding me?” Light floods the room—he’s standing on the other side of my bed, face tight and shadowy in the glare of the lamp.
“It was stupid.” I roll out of bed, back to the wall, defenses rising even though I know I’m in the wrong here. For this bit, anyway. “You sure paid me back, though.”
We stare at each other, gazes burning.
My palms are sweating. I clench my fists, unclench them. “I didn’t move on as fast as you think, Alex.” My voice weakens. “I didn’t date anyone seriously the whole time I was in college. But you did.”
Three days later, he posted: POLL: Our Little Secret or Half Moon Mill for a first date?
When I saw it, I stopped breathing for a solid minute, then let out a horrible, inhuman scream. I can still remember my mother passing by in the hallway, how she’d snapped at me. “It’s good you and that boy are over with. You were attached to each other more than was healthy.”
“I can’t believe you took another girl to Our Little Secret.” It’s asinine to still be stuck on that after all this time, but the imagery of him and a random girl together in our favorite booth still threatens to burst a blood vessel. And I know that Our Little Secret feels like “our little secret” to everyone, to all the local couples who get lovey-dovey there on anniversaries, but when you’re a teenager in first love, it really does feel like your little secret. “That’s where we ate dinner before prom, both years, you asshole.”
“So, you’re telling me,” he winds on faintly, “that you posted that picture to make me jealous.”
“Yes.”
He just stares at me for a beat, crazed. Then, all at once, the fight leaves his body.
“I posted the restaurant thing to make you jealous,” he blows out in a ragged rush, then slides down the wall to the floor. “I made it up, too.”
No.
“No. You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t.”
His lets his head thump gently against the wall. Tap, tap. “There was no girl.” His eyes are tortured. “Of course there was no girl. You were always the girl.”
A fuzz creeps into my ears. “But that. That’s why I . . .”
“Please.” He shakes his head. “Don’t. That makes it worse.”
I can’t speak. I sit down on the bed as the room spins around us.
After he posted that update, I lost it. Went on a five-day bender, engaged in some destructive behavior that was very unlike me, including a one-night stand with some guy called Rob I barely remember aside from the fact that he had black lights and a ton of iguanas and was skinny as a yardstick. I left Alex a voicemail telling him everything, half-shouting, half-crying. I never heard from him again. That night, that voicemail, so many other decisions I’d made, ate away at me for a long time.
He gusts another sigh. “I wanted that to be me.”
I can’t bear to look at him, my fingers reaching out to snatch up a pillow, clutching it to myself for something to ground me.
“That should have been us. I shouldn’t have waited so long . . . that night when we almost . . . I wish . . .” His voice breaks. “I just wanted it to be special. For our first time. I thought you were worth better than the back of a truck. I wanted to give you more.”
This quiet pain is unbearably worse than cursing, shouting. There is nothing more awful than Alex rolling up his sleeves to show me all the wounds I left on him, and him reckoning with the ones he gave to me.
“Please don’t,” I whisper. “I can’t believe you lied.”
“I can’t believe you lied.”
“I can’t believe neither of us suspected the other lied.”
“We were stupid,” he says after a while. “Our brains weren’t fully developed yet. Lying just to make the other person jealous? Stupid.” He can’t stop shaking his head. “I am so ashamed of myself. My only excuse is that we were young and dumb, but . . . Christ, what a way to treat the one we loved.”
My gaze snags on the empty side of the bed where Trevor’s been sleeping, and I hear an echo of Morgan’s words drift in from a few days ago: Let him see what could’ve been his. Make him sorry for what he lost.
My heart breaks all over again for us. I now know, without a doubt, that he’s sorry.
It doesn’t feel as satisfying as I’d imagined.