Page 47 of The Break-Up Pact

Earlier I’d been worried that Levi was taking this situation with Kelly too lightly, that at any moment the reality of it was going to come crashing down. Over the course of the night, of the reminiscing and the catching up and the kiss, I forgot to worry about it. Only now it feels like reality is settling in the wrong place. Somewhere in me, instead of in him.

I stop at the edge of the parking lot, searching his face. “That’s a really big decision to make, Levi.”

“I know,” he says, tugging lightly on my arm. “That’s why I want to know what you think about it.”

“I…” Have no way of answering that without feeling like the most selfish person in the world. I glance down at the pavement, and then back up at him, and by then, I can see my uncertainty leaking right into him. “I think you might be getting ahead of yourself. Have you really thought through what that would mean?”

Levi presses his lips together, shifting his weight between his feet. “Do you not want me to be here?”

“Of course I do,” I say quickly. “I just…” I carefully pull my hand out from his, and I don’t miss the quick streak of hurt across his face. “You’ve lived in New York for a decade. We’ve been pretending to date for two weeks now so you could win back someone else. Someone you only decided to move on from a few hours ago. You’ve barely had any time to process it.”

Levi shakes his head. “I feel like I’ve had too much time to process it. Years of it.” He’s more earnest than I’ve seen him in ages, but it’s grounded in resolve. “I’m not nearly as happy there as I am right here, right now.”

Everything about this is so tempting. I could fall into these words like warm sheets and tuck myself into them. Wrap myself up so tight that I can’t see the world beyond them. But somebody has to, and I’m not sure if Levi is thinking straight.

“Exactly. You’re happy right now, Levi,” I say as patiently as I can. “You’ve come out of years of living this life you didn’t plan to lead and you’re just coming up for air.”

He isn’t shaking his head anymore. Just staring at me, the blue of his eyes striking in the dark, the openness of them so stirring that I forget where we are.

“I’m happy with you,” he finally says. “I thought… I thought maybe you felt the same way.”

The words reach in too deep and too fast, and something in me gives way. Something I’ve held around my heart for so many years that I feel raw, letting it fall at our feet. The last protective barrier between me and Levi—the truth.

“Of course I do. I always have. And that’s just it, Levi—I can’t risk it again.” My throat is so tight that it’s an effort to say it, even as it’s tumbling out of me, even though the words have been waiting on the tip of my tongue, the back of my teeth, for years. “You cut yourself out of my life in high school over a crush. If you start telling me you’re here for good, and you wake up in a few days or a week or whenever from now, and you change your mind? It’s going to break me all over again.”

I’m almost out of breath when I finish. The confession empties me out, makes me feel like a stray balloon that’s going to go up and up and up if one of us doesn’t reach out and grab it, and fast.

But Levi’s just staring at me, stunned, every other emotion knocked right out of his face. “Wait—June, what do you mean about high school?”

I take a step away from him, coming back to myself. “Oh, come on, Levi. Everyone knew,” I say, my skin flaring hot from my ears to my chest. “Hell, they still do. All everyone in town says about us is that it’s ‘about time.’”

“But you didn’t like me,” Levi says slowly. “You said so yourself. Loudly. To my face.”

“If I recall, you said it first,” I remind him.

The memory doesn’t slam into me, because it’s always been there. Like it lives somewhere deep under my skin, where it’s been burrowing since the day it happened.

Of all clichés, it was just after prom. We’d gone as a group, Annie, Levi, me, and Mateo. Annie had peeled off pretty quickly to dance with some brooding guy in her English class. Mateo left early to meet up with Dylan for a sci-fi movie they’d wanted to see in theaters. And Levi and I, left to our own devices, spent the entire night dancing while our classmates snickered and pulled faces over our shoulders and we pretended not to notice.

It was a perfect night. Like Levi was a chorus to a song I’d known the words to my whole life, and we’d just reached the bridge. The melody was shifting, swelling, turning into something new.

I’d wanted to tell him how I felt since the start of my junior year, when suddenly Levi and I were holding each other’s gazes a little too long, keeping each other a little too close. And standing there with my cheek pressed to his shoulder, in my lavender dress with my hair all carefully styled in the intricate, swirling updo Levi’s mom had swooped it into just hours before, I almost did. But I knew Levi was going to Stanford with Annie. So I decided if our feelings really were mutual, I’d wait for him to say something. He was the one leaving, after all. I didn’t want to feel like I was tying him down.

When he dropped me off at home that night, he kissed me on the cheek, and asked if I wanted to meet up the next day and go for a hike in the woods, just him and me. I was up for hours after that, so giddy that it felt like my heart was going to burst in my chest, that I woke up still wearing my dress with my heels kicked onto the floor.

That morning I was still daydreamy and dopey, walking down to the beach to run some of it out of my system, when I heard people arguing under the boardwalk. Levi and Annie.

I was just going to ignore it and start my run. Annie squabbled all the time. Whatever it was about, it would be forgotten by the time they knocked their sandy shoes off on the front porch and came in for breakfast.

But then I heard Annie saying my name, and when I shifted myself out of the way of the wind, I could hear her words, plain and distinct: “You’re only doing this because of your big, stupid crush on June.”

“What crush?”

Levi’s question froze me in place like a rabbit listening for footfalls, but Annie’s voice was what made me stay. It was clear she was crying.

“Oh, come off it, Levi. You two have been all over each other for months. You’re flirting up enough of a storm that even your damn coaches think you’re dating.”

“She just flirts with me to be funny. You know how June is. It’s all just a joke to her,” said Levi, quick and placating. “She knows I don’t like her like that.”

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