“Then... Don’t you want to be with me?” I whispered.
“Too much.” He looked at me then, and all the heat and misery I felt was there in his eyes. The longing. The loss.
Oh God. My words jammed my chest. I could have argued against his logic. I would have battered myself against his tight-lipped, buttoned-up British reserve until he broke or I did. But I had no resistance against his pain.
He cleared his throat. “That’s why it’s better if you leave now. Before I... Before this gets any harder.”
“Don’t make this harder than it has to be,”Gray had said.
My heart cracked.
Tim wasn’t Gray. But the words were the same. The rejection was the same. The feelings churning inside me—denial, anger,grief, confusion—were the same. Which meant that maybe the fault wasn’t them. Maybe it was me, had always been me. Maybe there was something missing in me, some essential quality that would make someone love me. Choose me.
That would make someone stay.
—
Bullshit,” Reeti said after I’d cried on her couch for several hours. “Of course you are lovable. I love you. Your sister loves you.”
“Tim doesn’t.” I swallowed a fresh swell of tears.
She handed me another tissue. The coffee table in front of us was littered with the evidence of her caring: crumpled piles of damp, discarded tissues, two half-finished mugs of tea, an open bag of Oreos in a scattering of crumbs. “Tim is a heartless bastard.”
I appreciated her fierce loyalty. But even as I blew my nose, I knew that wasn’t fair. “He’s not heartless.” The look in his eyes when he said, “Too much...” My chest ached. My eyes welled. “He’s hurting, too.He’s trying to protect himself.”
“Fuck him,” Reeti said. “He hurt you.”
“Not intentionally.” I wiped my swollen eyes. “He just... He figures our relationship is on life support anyway, so he... he pulled the plug.”
“I’m still disappointed in him. He led you on.”
“But he didn’t.” Another raw hurt. I hugged a pillow close. “The clues were there, if I’d wanted to see. He never promised me a fairy-tale ending. He never gave me his door code. Heck, he didn’t even ask me to leave a toothbrush at his place.”
“Because you live upstairs.”
“That’s what I told myself. My point is, Tim never deceived me. I deceived myself. Again.”
Reeti squeezed my leg. “Don’t you dare blame yourself. You deserve better,didi. You deserve to be with someone who makes you feel like you are more, not less. Someone like Vir.”
“Iamwith someone like that.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Not Sam.”
I smiled mistily. “You.”
She wrapped her arms around me while I cried.
—
I couldn’t have gotten through the next two weeks without Reeti. She made me shower and wash my hair and go to my job at the library. She kept pressing cups of tea and bottles of water on me. (“You must hydrate,” she said firmly. To replace all the tears I was crying, presumably.) She cooked all my favorite meals, butter chicken andamritsari machhi, a spicy battered fried fish, and when her parents came with Vir for her graduation, she insisted I join them for dinner the night before.
“Nope. Not tonight,” I said firmly. “Tonight’s about you.”
“But my parents want to meet you.”
“I’ll see them at the party tomorrow. You don’t need me moping and whining at your family celebration.”
“You do not mope.”
