“Why not? You hated everything about that school. You couldn’t wait to leave. We both know you don’t want to go back there.”
Her stomach curled into a tight, uncomfortable knot.
There were so many things she wished she’d said and done differently. Things her grown-up self would have told her teenage self as well as her tormenters.
“I wasn’t that interested in studying.”
“We both know that wasn’t why you hated the place.”
She flushed, unsettled that he knew her so well. Her school days had been a miserable time. That whole period of her life would have been miserable had it not been for the O’Neil brothers, Tyler in particular.
“Why are we talking about this? It’s long since over and done with.”
“There you go again—avoidance. When it’s something difficult, you duck. Hide. Who was it? I want to know.”
“Who was what?”
“Who gave you a hard time?”
He’d asked her the same question repeatedly over the years, and she’d never given him an answer. “Why are you bringing that up now? It was a long time ago.”
“Exactly. So you might as well tell me.”
His persistence exasperated her. “It was no one.”
“You fell in the ditch by yourself?” He put his fingers under her chin and tilted her face to him. “Jackson and I had a few suspicions. Was it Mark Webster? Tina Robson? Those two caused most of the trouble in your grade.”
“It wasn’t them.” She tried to ignore the way
his hand felt against her skin. “I was clumsy, that’s all.”
“Honey, you skied with me, and most of the time you kept up. There were moments when you were almost better on that hill than I was.”
“Almost? Arrogance isn’t attractive, Tyler.” But she’d seen the gleam in his eyes and knew he was playing with her.
“Neither is evasion.” A smile that was altogether too attractive flickered at the corner of his mouth. “You’re never going to tell me, are you?”
“No. It’s behind me and anyway, I don’t need you protecting me.”
“Cameron Foster?”
“Tyler, stop!”
“If you’d told me who it was, I would have pushed them in the ditch.”
She knew that was the truth. Tyler O’Neil had spent more time in the principal’s office than he had in the classroom. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. You were in enough trouble without me being responsible for more. Look, I appreciate you volunteering to take that class, but you don’t need to. I can do it. We both know you’d hate it. Why would you want to put yourself through that?”
“Because it’s you.”
Her heart pumped a little faster. Hope, that thing she kept ruthlessly suppressed, flickered to life inside her. “What’s that supposed to mean? Why would you do it for me?”
He frowned, as if he thought it was a strange question. “Because I care about you. Because we’ve been friends since you could walk.”
Friends.
She felt a thud of something inside her and recognized it as disappointment.
How could she possibly be disappointed about something that had been her reality forever? She should be grateful for his friendship. It was greedy of her to want more, but still she did want more. She wanted it all. She wanted the whole fantasy.