“I’m not.” He sounded pained, but I was too full of jumbled-up emotions to slow down, adrenaline, longing, embarrassment, fear, all of them competing for mental real estate.
I whirled on him, words tumbling out one after the other, fear winning the war in my brain and all my worries spewing to the surface. “Why the heck have you been so nice to me? You hated my guts for three years. Why the change? Is it because I told you about my family? It’s because you feel sorry for me, isn’t it?”
“You think I hated you?” His voice was small and faraway.
“Didn’t you?” I demanded, even as I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Alden
“You think I hated you?” I sounded stricken even to my own ears. Silence stretched between us, whipping wind chilling me every bit as much as his lack of reply. He shrugged, which made me need to swallow hard before I could continue. “I always thought it was the opposite—all your teasing. You always seemed to barely tolerate me.”
His forehead creased. “You mean my trash-talking? You thought I was serious all those times I dogged you?”
“Sometimes.” I shrugged, hating this. “It can be hard to tell.”
“Sorry. I didn’t think…” Conrad exhaled hard. “And okay, maybe I made things worse, but you never seemed to like me, even from the first. Come on, admit it. You hated me for a long time.”
In that instant, I wished more than anything that lying came easily to me. Especially around him. Because I could feel the truth welling up, and I wasn’t sure I trusted him with it, but a quick retort simply refused to come.
“No. I wish.” I looked away, studying the mountains.
“What do you mean?” His tone was less demanding now, more curious. My brain kept flashing back to the night before—to holding hands in the dark, to how close I’d felt to everything I’d never let myself want.
I couldn’t not say the words. “I wanted to hate you,” I admitted. “You came in as a freshman, and it was like… Everyone loved you. Every. One. The professors. The lovesick kids at the Safe Space Alliance who followed you around. The play group. You were…golden.”
“Ha. I’m not golden. Just look at my last year. More like tarnished brass or some crap. You mean you were jealous because I was popular?”
“A little.” More like I’d wanted a piece of him for myself, wanted to capture all that golden sunlight he didn’t seem to think he had, but I didn’t know how to articulate that. “It all seemed to come so easily to you. Friends. School. Dating. I was…bitter, maybe. Harsh. Rude, probably.”
“Not that rude.”
“Liar.” I managed a rusty laugh. “That’s what I mean though—social stuff, it’s never been easy for me. Getting hung up on rules, getting anxious about stupid things and then snapping, that’s easier. And I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be…difficult.”
“You’re not difficult.” His reply was a little too quick to be believed. “Really. Not everyone needs to be an extrovert. And sometimes, it’s a curse—like everyone expects me to be happy and fun to be around. And then this last year, I haven’t been much fun at all, and a lot of my crowd drifted away. Better to have a few good, loyal friends than a good-time crew that ghosts as soon as shit gets hard.”
“I wish I’d known,” I said softly. “About it being hard for you. And I should have known. Should have seen the signs—”
“No, you shouldn’t have. I worked damn hard to make sure that few people knew the whole story. Heck, you know more than the professors now. I just didn’t want to admit how badly I screwed up.”
“You didn’t—”
“So you keep saying. And that proves my point. You’re not difficult. You’re a good guy.”
This time his words had the sort of warmth to them that I associated with sincerity. It could be tough to figure out truthfulness from body language, but there was a certain pitch he seemed to reach that had the ability to make my insides melt. And they worked like a caramel-coated truth serum.
“I didn’t hate you. I couldn’t. I kind of wanted to, but I liked you too much to hate you. Later though, it was…easier to focus on the things that annoyed me.”
“I can be annoying.” He laughed, then sobered. “You really liked me?”
I nodded. I’d come too far to yank the words back, even though my heart was performing an entire marching-band half-time show against my rib cage. He didn’t say anything for a long time, but right when I was about to head back to the car in disgrace, he put his hand on mine. Our gazes met, and my stomach wobbled at the intensity I found waiting in his blue depths.
“You were wearing a yellow button-down shirt when I saw you at the store the first time Professor Tuttle invited me to come play. You looked older than everyone else there. Important. Like…a hot TA or something.” It was the first time anyone had described me as a hot anything, but he didn’t give me a chance to enjoy the compliment because his mouth twisted as he continued. “Then you told me what I did wrong losing to Jasper.”