“Don’t youhmme.” My hands are fists. “Oh, I hate it when youhmme.”
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 whatyouthought 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 washurt, Romina. You’d broken up with me.”
“You keep saying that, but I didnot. 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 purgedhimself 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.Youmoved 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 referringto—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 itMuah! 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.”
