Page 21 of The Break-Up Pact

That, and Dylan has a mouth the size of the Atlantic. I love him to death, but it would take three minutes—four, tops—for him to say something to give us away.

“Canoodling is a strong word,” I say noncommittally.

Mateo just smirks into his to-go cup lid. “Maybe you’ll have fun with some even stronger ones after all that cake.”

My jaw drops, and I let out a choked laugh as Mateo waves goodbye and heads out the back. I pull out my phone to take a sneaky pic of his zigzag vest for the Instagram account in retaliation, but before I can, I’m stopped in my tracks—between the texts, DMs, and calls, there are enough notifications on my screen that I wonder if I somehow accidentally swapped phones with Beyoncé. I scroll all the way down, and at the bottom of them is a text from Sana I must have missed early this morning while I was on scone prep: Photos up at eight!!! An article ran with it. I know the writer, she’s a good bean.

I swipe open one of the other notifications at random and follow a link, and sure enough, Sana’s pictures are live and in color for the internet to behold, along with what seems to be a lengthy piece.

Tea Tide doesn’t open for an hour, so I sneak out the back entrance, past the small cluster of people already waiting at the door, and hightail it over to Levi’s. He’s outside on the patio, laptop open in front of him, frowning at his keyboard like he just picked a fight with the delete button. I make plenty of noise walking up, but he still blinks in surprise at the sight of me before setting his laptop closed a little too eagerly. Judging from the fact that I saw not one, but four different Word documents full of notes littering the screen, he probably needs the break.

“I’ve come to do a dramatic reading of the article that was just posted about us,” I declare.

Levi turns to me, his eyes looking uncharacteristically sleepy and his hair mussed in a way that makes my fingers twitch, as if they want to feel the strands thread through them. I’ve had some practice in the last week in trying to ignore these Levi-related impulses, but every now and then they catch me so off guard that my body gets ahead of my brain.

“Article?” he repeats, blinking like he’s willing himself awake. “I thought it was just a quick write-up.”

I ease into the chair next to him, crossing my legs and reopening my phone to send him the link. Mine finally loads just as his does, opening to a headline on a buzzy pop culture site: Who Are the “Revenge Exes”? June Hart & Levi Shaw Go Further Back Than Their Viral Breakups.

“Points for cramming in that SEO,” I murmur to myself.

The photos load first, just two of them. The first is the one Sana asked for, the two of us holding hands in front of the painting. She clearly took it just after Levi muttered that wisecrack about our game, though, because my head is tilted toward him and you can clearly see the split of my smile and Levi’s body is angled toward mine so close that it’s clear that he just said something into my ear.

The other photo is taken from the side, just after I “defended” Levi from the carrots. The moment when he touched my shoulders and I leaned into him, my back to his chest, and smirked up at him. The sight of it makes the air catch in my throat. We look so at ease, so natural. We look like a genuine couple.

I scroll past it, but it doesn’t do anything to uncoil the new tightness in my stomach. This strange kind of longing for something that doesn’t quite exist, that stopped existing a long time ago. I’m glad to have Levi back in my life, but that inherent ease we had as kids? That bone-deep familiarity of knowing each other inside out? I don’t think it’s something we’ll ever have again, and I don’t even understand how much I miss it until I’m looking at an echo of it on my screen.

I tilt my head and see that his eyes are stuck on the same photo mine were. After a moment, he senses me watching and glances up, seeming almost sheepish about it before looking past me toward the cluster of people outside Tea Tide.

“You’ve got a few minutes, right?” Levi asks, tilting his head toward the water. “I was about to go for a walk.”

Good call. We’re sitting ducks here, if someone spots us. We take ourselves to the mostly empty beach, both of us quietly scanning through the article as we make our way down to the water’s edge. Whoever wrote it did it with the same care and respect that Sana trusted them to have, but they did not leave a single stone in Benson Beach unturned. It’s not just a run-of-the-mill fluff piece. They went in and found high school friends, old teachers, the woman who runs the corner store where we used to get snacks after cross-country practice. I’m mildly alarmed by everything they’ve managed to dig up in the short time we’ve been a “couple,” but I’m also touched by how much people remembered.

Especially how much ridiculous stuff people remembered.

“I forgot about your absurd nicknames,” I say. In the old days, if I was getting on Levi’s nerves, instead of calling me by my actual name, he’d address me by whatever month it happened to be.

Levi’s shaking his head and letting out a groan. “I forgot about how you kept putting Pop Rocks in my damn sandwiches.”

“God, we all pranked each other into oblivion that summer. Remember how Annie snuck stickers on our backs while we were sleeping and we all had ridiculous tan lines for weeks?”

“I’m pretty sure there’s still a SpongeBob on my shoulder if you squint.”

We’re both laughing under our breath, at least until we get to the part toward the end. The article really did spare no details.

Shaw and Hart aren’t just bound by a childhood friendship, but by a mutual tragedy. Two years ago, Annie Hart—June’s older sister and a close friend of Levi’s—unexpectedly passed, leaving a grieving town in her wake.

There’s more beyond that, too. A brief delve into Annie and the mark she left on Benson Beach. How she was our high school valedictorian, a prolific writer, and a Stanford grad; the kind of friend who would both kill you with a look and kill for you at the drop of a hat; the kind of person who would come right back to her hometown to launch an entire tea shop on a competitive boardwalk strip with little to no experience in small business ownership and never let a single person tell her no.

I scroll past it quickly before it sinks in too deep. I just wasn’t expecting Annie to get pulled into this is all. Especially not for a stranger on the internet to take such careful consideration of her when she wrote it.

“You okay?” Levi asks quietly.

I’ve got ahold of my face by the time I look up from my phone. “Yeah,” I say. “Looks like we might be moving in the right direction.”

I point at the suggested articles linked at the bottom. “‘Roman Steele’s Sweet Cinderella Story Turning Sour?’” I read out loud.

His eyes are still lingering on me, careful and steady. “I’m sure that’s just tabloid fodder,” he says.

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