“I wanted to cheer you on,” he says, handing me a towel from a stack sitting on one of the starting blocks. I wrap it around my shoulders gratefully.
Behind us the whistle sounds and the next race begins, a flurry of splashing and shouting. Sawyer puts a hand on my shoulder, steering me toward the locker room, and I follow him, relieved to have someone pointing me in the right direction.
“You’re shaking,” he says, and I realize that he’s right. But at the door to the locker room I’m suddenly weary of all the high-pitched voices of my classmates from inside, many of them laughing, probably still about Teddy and me.
Instead I turn around and walk out into the hallway, my bare feet leaving wet footprints on the floor as Sawyer trails behind me. When we reach a small empty corridor between the nurse’s office and the gymnasium, I slide down the wall and onto the ground, tipping my head back against the cool concrete. My clothes are still soaked, and the towel is draped around my shoulders like a cape, and my hair is dripping onto the floor. But I’m grateful for the sudden quiet.
Sawyer sits beside me, leaving a little space between us, and I’m not sure why but I feel oddly guilty as I wait for him to say something.
“So did we win?” I joke, but his face doesn’t change.
“You like him, don’t you?”
My first instinct is to sayWho?to buy myself some time, or maybe just to avoid the conversation altogether. But I can’t do that to him. Not after all the nice things he’s done for me. He was the one who took care of the boat. The one who gave me a towel. The one who offered me a hand.
He was the one who was there for me today.
And it’s not fair to him to pretend.
“Yes,” I say in a small voice, flicking my eyes back to the puddle I’ve left on the floor so I can feel rather than see the way he steels himself, can sense the hurt so close to the surface, the way it radiates off him with a kind of heat.
“I waited the other night,” he says, pulling his knees up. “To make sure you got in okay. I saw him there on the stoop, and the way you guys were talking.”
“Nothing happened,” I say, which is the truth. Nothing happened then, and nothing ever will. Teddy has assured me of that much. Our kiss that morning in his apartment feels like it happened to two other people entirely.
Sawyer gives me a sorrowful look. “It didn’t have to.”
“We’re just friends,” I say, trying not to sound so disappointed by this. A drop of water slides down my nose and Sawyer lifts a hand to wipe it away, then changes his mind and lowers it again. But his eyes remain fixed on mine, and I can tell he wants to kiss me. Honestly there’s a part of me that wants to kiss him too. But I know that wouldn’t be fair, because I just don’t feel the same way he does. I wish I did. I want more than anything to feel for him what I do for Teddy, because everything would be so much simpler that way, so much better.
But I don’t. And I can’t help that.
So I pull back, just slightly, and his face clouds over. “Does he even like you back?”
It takes me a second to say the word, and when I do there’s something hollow about it. “No.”
“Because I do,” he says, his voice gruff. “I like you, Alice. A lot. I think you’re amazing, and if he can’t see that, then—”
“Sawyer,” I say, because I can’t bear to let him finish. “I’m so sorry.”
He gives me a hard look. “I know you like me too.”
“I do,” I say, my stomach twisting as his eyes fill with hope. “But it’s just…it’s different with Teddy. I wish it wasn’t. I wish it was you instead. But I just can’t seem to shake this thing with him.”
“You two have a history,” he says, like it’s the worst thing in the world, though history is what he loves.
“We do,” I say. “But it’s not about that.”
Sawyer sits very still for a minute, then rises to his feet, looking down at me with an unreadable expression.
“You know he doesn’t deserve you, right?” he says a little angrily. “That’s why this sucks so much. It’s hard to watch you waiting around for something that’ll never happen because he’s too self-centered to notice what’s right there in front of him.”
I open my mouth, then close it again, unsure what to say to that. But it doesn’t matter anyway. Sawyer turns and walks back down the hallway, the sound of his footsteps fading until they’ve disappeared altogether.
Even after he’s gone I stay there like that, my heart sunk low, my eyes still burning from the chlorine, thinking about how the worst part of it all is that he’s probably right.
Later that evening Leo and I are standing outside Teddy’s apartment.
“You know this is pretty much the last place I want to be right now, right?” I say, and Leo gives me an exasperated look.
