“Why’d you go into the army?” I ask, intentionally trying to get a rise out of him.
He points to his chest. “Navy.”
“Are you going to answer any of my questions or just stand there? I’ll even give you some easy ones. How do you know I don’t like peppers? How’d you?—”
“I paid attention,” he interrupts.
Paidattention. He’s talking about before, when we were younger.
I let out a humorless laugh. “That much is obvious. You knew just how to push my buttons.” I shove my fingers into the air at imaginary buttons. “Just which ones to push for maximum humiliation.”
His eyes harden on me. “And you think I don’t regret that? You think it didn’t keep me up at night, even then? That it didn’t keep me up at night foryears?”
For a moment, I stand still, shocked, but I recover just as quickly. “What, I’m supposed to feel sorry for you?Poor Sawyer!He felt bad for intentionally humiliating me foryears! Oh! And laughing about it with his friends!”
All the pain of those moments hits me like a tsunami, except I’m not sad about it anymore. I’m furious. Sawyer robbed me of a happy school life. The one place I should have been able to forget about my problems at home, aboutmy dad, the bills, the rundown house I was behind on maintaining, and Sawyer made it a different kind of hell without a second’s thought.
Between clenched teeth, he says, “I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me. There’s no excuse for what I did. None.”
He averts his gaze, watching the floor. His body is strung tight, jaw clenched.
I snort. “Is that seriously all you have to say to me? Is that your version of an apology?”
His eyes cut to me. “There is no apology big enough to encompass everything I did. Any words would be meaningless.”
Like a bull, my breath blows out through my nose, my head dips as I glare at him through slitted eyelids. I’m practically pawing at the ground, ready to charge at him.
“Try,” I snarl. “Or, better yet, tell me why. Why did you do it? Day in, day out, for years. Did you just hate me that much?”
His laugh is hollow, and his voice rises a little. “Ididn’thate you. That was the problem!”
I’mso closeto actually strangling him. “I’m sick of your riddles, Sawyer. Just say what you mean!”
Tugging on his hair, he lets out a loud huff and turns away from me. After a few steps, he circles back around, huffing again. I recognize his expression. It’s the same one I just wore. He’s about to explode.
He stops a few feet away, hands in his hair. “You really want to know?”
I shout, “Yes, I want to know!”
Turning, he paces away and back again. “Fine!”
“Just tell me!”
“I was obsessed with you, Brie! Ever since we were little kids, I was fuckingobsessed.”
My mouth drops and I swear my heart literally stops in my chest. Surely he can’t mean what it sounds like.
“You were shy, but sure of yourself,” he says. “You barely ever spoke, but when you did it washonest, none of the usual bullshit that comes out of people’s mouths. You were clumsy, but determined. Even when you were down,evenwhen something awful happened, you’d brush yourself off and just keep going.”
Anger replaces my shock as I take in his words. “What was I supposed to do?” I spit out. “Curl up in the fetal position and cry? Beg you to stop? Fight you?”
“No! Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Sawyer, youonlymade fun of me. You made my life a living hell. Constantly.”
He blinks rapidly. “I know.” He shuts his eyes and presses his lips tight, shaking his head. “I know.”
“So you see why I can’t believe you,” I say more quietly. “I can’t believe you were ‘obsessed’ with me and still treated me like shit.”
