“Funny,” she said. “I came up with three options as I was falling asleep last night.” He didn’t need to know she’d written them down and numbered them in order of preference in the Bullet Journal she kept on her nightstand.
“Excellent. Hit me.”
“Well, there’s plan A: we can keep plugging away on our projects. Plan B: we can fire up Netflix. Or plan C: we can spend all day in bed, reading and napping.”
He quirked a brow at her. “In bed? Sounds heavenly.”
The words scorched the air around her. She hadn’t meant to say that, but it slipped out and now the image throbbed in her brain. Tom, sprawled across her bed, curly head propped on his hand while the other held a book. Setting it aside when he noticed her eyes drifting shut and then wrapping them both in a blanket. Napping together and waking to find his hand sliding under her clothes, seeking—
Her cheeks heated, and she reached for her coffee mug to halt her wayward thoughts.Thatwasn’t part of the plan.
“Different beds and different bedrooms of course,” she clarified, inwardly wincing at her prissy tone. “Speaking of, have you gotten over feeling weird about being in Josie’s room?”
He shrugged. “I still wake up feeling like a stranger in a strange land.”
She didn’t buy that for a second.
“But you’reyou.You’re not a stranger anywhere you go.”
He looked up from his plate and waved his fork in a circle. “Explain.”
Oh Lord. She’d said too much, but now he was looking at her with curious eyes, so she babbled on. “Well, look at you. You’re cooking in my kitchen. You’ve kept a conversation going with me like no time’s passed at all. You’re acting like you can just forget that thing our senior year ever happened. You’re unstoppable.”
He chewed a bite of omelet and swallowed, then wiped his mouth on a napkin. “I’m an extrovert. Guilty. When I’m an old man, I’ll be that person talking to himself on the L platform because I love the sound of my own voice. But as for that thing in high school, I did try to bring it up the first night, and you didn’t want to talk about it, so hell, whynotpretend it never happened?”
She scoffed, then filled her mouth with omelet to keep from saying anything else stupid.
He lowered his fork. “What?”
She took her time chewing and swallowing. “Easy for you to say.”
He suddenly looked a lot less relaxed. “Excuse me?”
She regretted bringing it up but forged ahead anyway. “I mean,Iwas the one who got humiliated. It just madeyoulook like a jerk.”
Tom made an elaborate show of looking over his left shoulder, then his right one. “Weird. I don’tseethe asshole responsible sitting at this table.”
She slammed her coffee cup down as the memory of Tom’s old betrayal resurfaced to hook its claws into her brain. “You’re joking, right? You shared a text I sent you, aprivatetext, with the whole school. You called me aslut. Textbook asshole as far as I’m concerned.”
Although his hands balled into fists on the tabletop, he spoke in a flat voice. “I was a dumb kid in high school, but I thought you knew me better than that.”
“I texted you that I wanted to end things with Dylan. I said…”
She swallowed convulsively, amazed at the capacity of that old hurt to conjure fresh pain.I’m going to break up with Dylan. I need to be with someone who really sees me.She’d texted that to Tom between math class and PE the last week of their senior year. And she’d waited for his reply with her heart lodged in her throat, praying he’d understand what she was asking:Do you see me the way I think you do? Should I really be with you instead?But by the time she’d changed into her gym clothes and made it outside, she was greeted with a hissed chorus of “whore” and “I’ll give you that D” from the smirking classmates lying in wait for her on the rubber track.
“You put the screenshot in the class Facebook group.” She closed her eyes as she recited the words, unable to look at the grim face of the man across from her. “‘The quarterback’s slut wants to get laid. Who’s got next?’” Words she’d never been able to shake. Words that still hit like a punch to the gut.
“How can you still think it was me?”
Her eyes flew open at the harsh rasp in Tom’s voice. “Because I sent it toyou, and then it ended up online!”
He banged a fist on the table, sending a spoon clattering to the floor. “Oh, and our phones were so secure back then, right? It’s not like it took a team of hackers weeks and weeks to crack my shit. It probably took Dylan all of thirty seconds to post that from my phone.”
“Sure, Dylan just happened to be holding your phone when I texted you my secret desire to break up with him.” She scoffed, but she struggled to put any heat behind it. Was he really trying to tell her it hadn’t been him?
“The Castle bad luck.” Tom grimaced and plunged a hand through his already disheveled curls. “He was borrowing mine for the calculator because his battery was dead.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it again as her mind worked. She’d spent years wondering how the Tom she’d known could be capable of something so ugly, and she’d never truly been able to reconcile his actions with the person who’d been her closest friend. Still, one detail stuck in her mind from that horrible afternoon, and it’s what had convinced her that she didn’t know Tom at all.
