After she leaves, I grab my laptop to go over my new courses. I can’t believe I’m in the homestretch. It’s coming too fast and not fast enough.
I'm fine. I'm choosing my own life. This is what it looks like at the start. I can see the end, and that’s what I’m working toward. The road is filled with potholes, but I just have to hold on tight and keep my eyes on the prize. Maybe one day we’ll both be in a place where we can commit fully to each other. I know I will always love him.
I just can’t say he’ll feel the same way, especially after what I did.
Chapter Three
DECLAN
I've been awake since four.
Not the productive kind of awake where you get things done, like a hard workout or studying. Nope, my early morning was the staring-at-the-ceiling kind.
I’ve been back two days and have heard nothing from her. I quit calling and texting. She ghosted me. I’m not going to grovel. I don’t know what the hell happened, but I know I did nothing wrong.
By six, I give up trying to sleep and decide to be productive. I go for a run. It is dark and cold—a dreary January morning. Snow is piled up in little mounds that will be there for at least a month. My breath comes out in white puffs. I push until my lungs burn enough to drown out everything else. It works for about forty-five minutes.
I go back to the house and head for the shower. I don’t want to think about her, but it’s impossible. She’s everywhere. She left her shampoo in the shower. And like a freak, I used it. I inhaled the scent, and it just made me even more miserable.
I dress without a care. I don’t care what I look like.
It’s the first day of classes. New semester. Last semester. I’m so ready to be done. I walk to campus, hands shoved in my pockets, the cold working its way through my jacket because I grabbed the wrong one on the way out. I noticed when I was halfway down the block and kept walking anyway. The cold felt good.
I’ll see her today. I’m certain of it.
I don't even know what I'm hoping for.
That's not true. I know exactly what I'm hoping for. I've known since I walked into her empty room and stood there like an idiot trying to figure out why her bed was stripped. I'm hoping she sees me and that something on her face explains everything. Some version of events where this makes sense. A problem I can fix. I'm good at problems that have solutions.
The campus is already busy. People are streaming in from the parking lots and the residential streets, most of them carrying coffee and showing that particular first-day energy that's half optimism and half dread. I walk the main path toward the science building because my first class is in Harmon Hall, and that's the most direct route. My phone vibrates in my hand.
It’s a text from Crew in the group chat that I noticed Sutton is no longer a part of. She removed herself. Crew’s bitching about a drop of milk left in the carton. I ignore it.
When I look up, she's there.
My heart skips a beat. I feel like I haven’t seen her in a year, not in weeks.
She’s walking fast, coffee in hand, backpack on one shoulder. Her hair is down. She's looking at something on her phone. She hasn't seen me yet, and I have approximately three seconds before she does.
My body stops moving.
It's not a conscious decision. My feet just stop, as if every muscle decided simultaneously that forward motion was nolonger an option. I stand there in the middle of the path. I watch her cross the quad, and then she looks up, the way you do when you feel something. That sixth sense that says you’re being watched.
She sees me.
She doesn't run.
That's what I register first. She sees me, and she stops walking, but she doesn't turn around or reroute. She doesn't do the thing she used to do during our first year after our breakup. She'd spot me coming and find a sudden, urgent need to be somewhere in the opposite direction.
This time, she just stops. Holds my gaze from twenty feet away. Waits.
Okay.
I can work with that. It’s something. It’s an opening.
I cross the quad.
She watches me come the whole way. Her face is blank. I've spent years learning to read Sutton Webb, and the fact that I can't place this one right now makes the back of my neck prickle. It's not cold. It's not angry. It's indifference, and that is the worst possible expression.
