“You didn’t,” she basicallygasped.
I stared at her as I dragged the glass of iced water toward me by the coaster. My face went red, red, red as I remembered for about the hundredth time the unforgiveable, unforgettable crap I’d typed as my last message toAaron.
Xoxo.
X-freaking-oxo.
Ugh. Ugh,ugh,ugh.
For the rest of my life. For the rest of the universe’s existence.Forever.
Tali’s eyes bulged and her face turned a shade of red that bordered on maroon. Her hands went up to her chest and the entire upper half of her body molded to the booth’s back cushion like she was attempting to melt into it. Like she was reliving what I’d done in her head and wanted to disappear. I knew that expression. I’d tried to do the same thing after I’d hit Enter on the keyboard. I’d wanted a black hole to suck me in and make medisappear.
“Ruby,” she inhaled my name,wildly.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t been able to pull aBack to the Future. My random black hole hadn’t appeared either. I’d shut the screen of my laptop as if that would magically make the lettersdisappear.
But I knew thetruth.
And Aaron knew thetruth.
I’d sent himthatxoxo.
Closing the screen hadn’t done a single freakingthing.
When I’d opened my laptop again, those letters had still been there on the screen,mockingme.
“Why would you do that?” Tali busted out, her hands still going up to cup her nearly maroon cheeks. Her dark blue eyes, which were the only thing we had in common, were glassy like she wasn’t pulling enough oxygen into her brain from how hard she’d been, and still was,crackingup.
She was going to make me relive it even more than I already had. Why was I surprised? “I didn’t do it on purpose. One second, we were messaging each other, joking around, then the next thing he types ‘bye,’ and before I realized what I was doing, I wrote that.” I thought about raising my hands directly in front of me where we could both see them, so I could shake them and shame them for what they’d done. They’d betrayed me. They’d gone rogueonme.
After all we’d beenthrough….
My sister threw her head back and laughed, loud, finally, her entire body vibrating. Even while she was cracking up, she was one of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen. I didn’t miss her fingers wiping at the tears I was sure pooled at her eyes. I’d known that was going to be her exact reaction. I’d known it. I’d expected it. That was why it had taken me days to fess up. Because if it had been the other way around and she’d been the idiot who wrote a friend “xoxo,” I would have been thesameway.
“And he didn’t say anything afterward?” she somehow managed to ask even as shecrackedup.
I shook my head as I watched her pinched face, scowling. “I closed my computer screen and he’dloggedoff.”
I shrugged and let them drop in defeat, in total freaking failure. At this point, half my life seemed like a failure. What wasonemore?
I was starting to sound like Jasmine with her “the world is working againstme”crap.
“Oh, Ruby,” Tali half sighed and half choked like she could feel my pain but also thought it was hilarious. “Did you e-mail himafter?”
I waited until after I took another sip of water before telling her the truth. “No, I thought it would make it worse.” What I didn’t tell her was that I’d stayed in bed for two hours going over that sequence of two letters like a broken record, wishing I could go back in time and relive those three seconds again so I could stop myself from possibly ruining a friendship that I’d really started to care about for over the last ninemonths.
That was an understatement I was still lying to myself over, and probably would keep lying to myself over for the rest ofmylife.
Friendship.
Like that was all I felt for this man whose face I had never seen.That’show I knew I had it bad. I didn’t even know what he looked like and I had such a huge attraction to him it didn’tmatter.
He was nice, but not too nice. Funny. Honest. Spiteful enough to be real. And he wasn’t a creep. He understood me and stilllikedme.
So it wasn’t a surprise that I liked Aaron Hall. I liked him a lot. A lot, a lot. More than a lot. If I really let myself think about it, I wouldn’t even call what I felt for him being along the linesof“like.”
Even though I knew there was a thousand and a half things he wasn’t willing to sharewithme.
