I was laughing now, the absurdity of it breaking through my embarrassment. “You’re telling me this to make me feel better, but actually it’s making everything weirder.”
“I’m an open book.” He kissed my shoulder. “A deeply flawed, occasionally stupid open book.”
The grin faded slowly, and he was studying me again—reading me the way he always did, looking past the surface into the tangled mess underneath.
“Do you regret it?” he asked quietly.
Last night. His mouth on my throat. My back arching off his sheets. The sound of my own voice saying things I’d never said to anyone. My body was still humming with it—every muscle loose and warm, a pleasant soreness between my thighs that made me aware of every shift against the mattress.
“I’m still recovering, actually.” I pressed my lips together against the smile threatening to split my face. “You might have to carry me to the bathroom. Several key muscle groups have filed a formal complaint.”
Heat flared in his eyes. “I could carry you.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m offering.”
“I know what you’re offering, and we both know that’s not how we’d end up in the bathroom.” I poked his chest. “We’d get distracted. There would be inappropriate shower activities. Mrs. Willow would hear things that would make her regret the lemonade.”
He laughed—and the sound settled something in my chest. Then, his hand came up to brush a curl from my forehead, and as his gaze held mine.
The air between us changed. Grew heavier.
“Can I ask you something?” His voice had taken a lower note now.
My heart climbed into my throat. “Depends.”
“Seven years ago.” His thumb traced my temple, barely touching. “I need to know why.”
The question that had been waiting in the corner of every conversation since I came back to California.
I sat up slowly, pulling the sheet around me like it could protect me from what was coming.
“Because I wasn’t enough for you,” I said.
He pushed himself upright. “What are you talking about?”
“I heard you, Jack.” My voice was steady. I’d had seven years to practice keeping it steady. “The party. Spring semester of your last year. You were outside with your friends—James, Davis, the whole entitled pack—I heard everything.”
Jack’s face went blank, like his brain was reaching back through years of memory, trying to locate the exact moment that had ruined everything.
“Someone asked about me—the girl with the curly hair who was always with Claudette.” I could still hear it. The ice clinking in expensive glasses. The lazy, overfed laughter of boys who’d been handed the world and thought it owed them entertainment. “And you said—” My throat tried to close. I forced the words through anyway. “You said I was nobody. Just Claudette’s friend. That I’d always had a crush on you.”
I watched recognition dawn across his face—he sat up straighter.
“They laughed,” I continued. “And you laughed with them. And then I went back to my dorm room and spent the rest of thenight trying to figure out how I’d been stupid enough to think a guy like you would actually want a girl like me for real.”
“Pauline—” His expression turned pained.
“The next day you showed up at my door asking me to be your girlfriend. Officially. Publicly. And all I could think was that you wanted to make it official now? After hiding me for months and letting your friends think I was a joke?” My hands were fisted in the sheet. “So I said no. Because I didn’t want to be any other joke or prank you might have planned with your friends.”
The silence that followed was enormous. Jack’s jaw was tight, his hands pressed flat against the mattress on either side of him like he was trying to anchor himself.
“That conversation,” he said finally, and his voice was thick with emotions, “is the single worst mistake I have ever made in my entire life.”
“You don’t have to explain anything now?—”
“No. Listen.” He shifted closer but didn’t touch me—like he needed me to hear this without the distraction of his hands on my skin. “Those men were predators. They didn’t date women—they traded stories about them and ranked them like cars or watches or some other thing to acquire and show off.” His eyes were blazing now, all the control stripped away. “James especially. He was—Christ, he was cruel. The things he said about women, the way he talked about them like they were only worth what they could offer him?—”
