“Twenty questions?” I asked. “Can we play twenty questions?”
He smiled. “Sure.”
“Great,” I said, fire flaring in my heart. “My version, though.”
“What’s your version?”
I went in for the kill. “There are only three questions, not twenty, and I will be the one asking them.”
“Ah.” Marco rubbed the back of his neck. “I walked into that, didn’t I?”
I tried to keep my composure. “Sometimes I feel like we’re so close,” I said. “Last-thought-at-night, first-thought-in-the-morningclose.” I thought about everything he’d shared, from how happy he was to shed his high school hoodies and prom king persona when he got to Princeton, to his dream of writing a book, to inviting me to Stone Harbor. “But then suddenly you’re drifting away, like you’ve changed your mind—you’d rather be nothing more than a guy I used to know.” I swallowed. “You can’t have it both ways, Marco. It’s not fair.”
Marco was silent for a moment, then caught my eyes and held them. I felt like I was standing on the edge of a cliff, right about to fall. “What’s the first question?”
I cleared my throat. “Why did you break up with Shelly again?”
“Because she’s toxic,” he said. “She’s arrogant, narcissistic, and manipulative.” He paused. “She also stole my laptop to email herself my manuscript.” He made a face as my eyes widened. “Apparently, she wanted to see if it was any good.”
I wished I could sew my mouth shut.
Marco smirked. “If you ask what it’s about, it counts as a question.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Maybe someday.” He winked, then prompted, “Next question?”
“Why did you get back together with Shelly when…?” I trailed off, leaving the rest unsaid.Why did you get back together with Shelly when you were thinking about me?
“Because I’m only twenty, Mads.” He sighed. “I’m a dickhead who doesn’t know anything.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not a good enough answer.”
“What would make it better?”
“The truth. Tell me the truth.”
Silence. Silence for one, two, three, four, five minutes. His voice actually made my heart leap a little in surprise when he spoke. “I suspected something was going to happen between you and Connor, and I was jealous—reallyjealous—because I could tell how badly you wanted it to happen. Shelly begged to get back together in Stone Harbor, so I said yes.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “You couldn’t have turned her down?”
Marco shook his head, at a loss for words. He raised his hands in surrender. “I was…” He trailed off in thought. “I was scared of how hard I was falling for you, Mads. I have always been drawn to you—ever since high school—but it felt like treading waterin the ocean this year.” He took a deep breath. “And just when I found out you felt something too, you and Connor decided to give things a shot—which I feel like you guys needed to do. Shelly was there, and I knew where I stood with her.” He grimaced. “What I did was terrible. Playing cat and mouse with you was wrong, and I’m sorry. You overwhelm me. You overwhelm me in the most amazing way, but I wasn’t ready to embrace that—it would’ve been dangerous to embrace that, because I was keeping an eye on you for Katie.”
“Why?” I said over my pounding pulse. “Why did you agree to spy?”
Marco mimed zipping his lips.
“It’s my third question,” I said. “Answer, please.”
“Because she knew you weren’t comfortable with Ready-Set-Date. She knew you were game, and that it would be good for you in a sense, but she knew you weren’t fully comfortable.”
She is so supportive of her friends and everything important in their lives, I remembered Meredith saying.She keeps us safe and makes us better.
“She called me that night you were at Princeton,” Marco said gently. “It wasn’t a coincidence that we ran into each other at Wawa. After you told Austin you were all alone, she called me and told me to get my ass over there to make sure you were okay. She didn’t want anything or anyone to hurt you.”
My heart ached. Oh, Katie—freakingKatie. “Holy crap,” I murmured. “She cares. She did it because she cares about me.”
“Yeah.” Marco nodded. “She cares a hell of a lot, Mads.”
