“I freaked out after what happened with us that night, Lucy. I shouldn’t have slept with you. I knew it the entire summer, but you were so damn sweet, and I needed you so damn much…”
“So you called…Abby?” she asks incredulously.
“Yes,” I say with an honesty that’s oddly freeing. “But not for the reason you think. I told her to come over, yes, but I knew you were coming over. I wanted you to see us together.”
She laughs, and my gut twists when I realize she’s crying at the same time. “So I was right. You’re a bastard.”
“No,” I say, reaching out a hand, then letting it drop. “I mean yes, but it didn’t go as planned. I wanted you to see me and Abby talking, not…”
“Making out?” she says snidely.
“Abby misinterpreted my call,” I say, even as I realize how lame it sounds. “Which I guess I let her, being an idiot kid like I was. But I swear to you, I never laid a hand on Abby that night except to push her away.”
She snorts, and the sound is all watery. “I saw you kissing her.”
“Her kissing me,” I say with such finality that she goes still. “Abby kissed me right as you walked in, but I swear to you I didn’t want her for even a second. Nobody…there’s nobody I wanted after I had you.”
“Then why?” she whispers. “Why would you want to push me away?”
Fuck all. “Because you were leaving. Damn it, Lucy, you’re always leaving. You were heading to college, and you had all these fucking dreams, and…”
“Wait. All of this crap, back then and now…this is you leaving before I can leave you?”
I swallow. “I’m not proud of the way I did it, but I don’t regret it.”
She shakes her head. “How can you say that? You stand there pretending you were all noble but you almost destroyed me!”
“For how long, an hour?” I ask, my voice angry now, stepping forward. “Maybe a couple more weeks until you went to college, sulking about the loss of your cherry to a cheating jerk?”
“Longer than that!” she shouts, equally angry. “I loved you! You knew that, and you used it against me.”
Her proclamation rocks through me, but I don’t let it sink in. I
can’t handle it. “Maybe, Lucy. Maybe. But you got over me.”
“Because I had to, but it wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t—”
“It was easy!” he snaps. “It took you, what, six months before you found someone else? That skinny redhead with the douchebag glasses?”
She stares at me in confusion, and it seems to take her a full ten seconds to even register what I’m talking about. “Are you seriously throwing Matt Terry at me right now? The guy I dated for all of fifteen seconds? I caught you cheating on me, what was I supposed to do, wait around for a second chance at heartache?”
“No,” I say, lifting my hands and pressing them to my temples, then letting them drop again. “No, I didn’t want you to wait at all. I never wanted…I never thought we’d get tangled up again. We only proved what I knew back then.”
“Which is what?”
“We’re no good together, Lucy. You’re…you’re vivacious and driven and you always want more. You’re always looking to the next thing.”
She tries to set a hand on my chest, but I step away, and her face flinches in hurt, but she presses on. “Look, Reece, I was eighteen and probably not that great at expressing myself. I wanted to go to college, yes, I wanted to be all things, and do all things, but you were always one of them. I’m sorry if I ever let you think otherwise. Truly.”
“Maybe,” I say quietly. “But you know better now, right? You know now that I’m a summer fling, and better in bed but not boyfriend material?”
“What are you—” Her mouth drops open. “Wait. Wait. Tell me you didn’t read my journal.”
I shove my hands in my pockets and stare at her, so buried in my own pain that I don’t see the slap coming.
The crack of her palm against my cheek echoes between us, but the sadness in her eyes hurts a hell of a lot more than the slap itself.
“That’s why you pulled back,” she says with a disbelieving laugh. “You read my rambling, angry, private thoughts in a stupid notebook and decided to base our entire future on what you read there.”