I lean in automatically, ready to kiss her again—but her hand presses lightly against my chest, stopping me.
“You should probably go back,” she whispers.
“Why?” I murmur, still close.
She looks up at me. “Because your mom and Bailey are waiting.”
“They’re catching up,” I say, bracing one arm against the wall beside her head. “That can take hours.”
She gives me a look. The kind that wins arguments without trying.
“…Okay, fine,” I sigh.
“Also,” she adds, glancing around, “making out in a dark alley is extremely cliché.”
“Yeah?” I say. “Well…even if we’re in a dark alley,” I start, “there’s no one else I’d rather be here with.”
Something in her expression shifts the moment the words leave my mouth. She stills for half a second.
I lean in again—but she straightens gently, creating space between us.
“Okay,” she says softly. “We should go.”
Confusion flickers through me for a moment, but I nod anyway. We walk back around the building in quiet steps, the night suddenly cooler than before. The parking lot lights feel too bright after the shadows. We stop beside her car.
“Well,” I say with a small grin, “I’ll see you at school.”
“Yeah,” she answers, not quite meeting my eyes.
I lean forward a little, but she’s already opening the car door.
“I should go,” she says quickly. And then she’s inside, the engine starting almost immediately. The headlights sweep across the pavement and she’s gone before I can process any of it.
I’m left standing there alone in the quiet parking lot, hands still half-lifted like my brain hasn't caught up yet.
What the fuck was that?
38
MADDY
History always repeats itself
There’s no one else I’d rather be here with.
The sentence keeps replaying in my head, over and over. Like one of those annoying supermarket songs that follows you home and refuses to leave.
The words Jacob used to say. All the time.
There is no one else I’d rather be with.
And I believed every single one of them, but he still cheated. So what if Ryan is the same? Some quiet part of me insists he isn’t. That Ryan isn’t Jacob, that this feels completely different. But how am I supposed to trust my own instincts when I was so completely wrong the last time?
All day I’ve been trying to stay busy. Which, apparently, has become my strategy lately. If I keep moving, if I keep doing something, my brain won’t have time to spiral.
So I’m at work. Again.
Making coffee. Steaming milk. Restocking milk. Baking cinnamon rolls. Baking banana bread. Drinking too much coffee. Finding literally anything to do that doesn’t involve thinking. But it doesn’t work.
