Page 48 of The Break-Up Pact

The words felt like a clean slice right through my ribs, so sharp and so fast that I couldn’t even feel the pain of them. Just the white-hot humiliation, the shock of disbelief. It felt worse than a rejection. It felt like a betrayal, or maybe something worse. Either he was lying to Annie and throwing me under the bus, or we’d so fundamentally misunderstood each other for the past year that it made every moment between us feel cheap.

I didn’t hide. I marched under the boardwalk and confronted them both right on the spot. It was like I didn’t have a choice—my body was moving before I could think, and then there they were, Annie red in the face and Levi looking more stricken at the sight of me than he would at the boardwalk collapsing.

Levi’s voice pulls me out of the memory, the calm in it jarring me, bringing me back to the balmy night. “Did Annie ever tell you why we were fighting?”

I drop his gaze. “No.”

He steps off the curb where we’ve been standing and I follow, settling in closer to the exterior of the bar, where fewer people can see us.

Levi worries his lip with a guilt that I know too well—a guilt for something that happened back then that only feels magnified now. The same way anything involving Annie does, now that she’s gone.

“That morning I told Annie I was going to New York. I blindsided her. She was furious, and I still don’t blame her. We’d been talking about going out to the West Coast together for years, and then I was dropping this bomb on her.” He runs a hand through his hair, and I can tell it takes a lot of effort to meet my eye as he says, “She said—she said I was only doing it because of you.”

“Why would she think that?” I ask, not bothering to hide the bitterness in my voice.

“Because I was.” Levi says it so plainly, so honestly, that it feels like that same slice in my ribs is opening again. Like I could look down right now and stare into my own beating heart. “Because I hadn’t even left yet, and I already missed you so badly I couldn’t stand it.”

I shake my head. “That day on the beach. You said…”

Levi’s voice is so steady that suddenly I’m the one who’s gone wobbly, like we’re just taking turns trying to steer this conversation before it can spin out from under us.

“I know what I said. And I was horrified you heard it. The truth is, I was just saying whatever I could to calm Annie down. I didn’t want to fight, so I just—was a coward about it,” he admits. “As soon as I realized you heard, I was going to take it back. But then you turned around and said you didn’t like me, either.”

Those words were a sharp line in the sand—a divider between the end of childhood and the start of something else. Levi avoided me the rest of that summer. Left for New York early to get his bearings and didn’t do anything more than send short texts in response to mine for two solid years. When I finished up my freshman year of college and I realized he was still in touch with Annie and not with me, I gave up on him altogether.

He tried to come back, though. It’s easy for me to push that aside, but he did. Around the time I graduated and took off with Griffin for the trip that turned into a few dozen more, he started texting every month or so. Called on my birthdays. Asked if I was ever coming into the city. But by then I was so angry with him that I wouldn’t budge. I told myself it was the only choice I had, the only way to protect myself from the hurt—but now that I’m looking into Levi’s eyes, I understand that it wasn’t just that. I was looking to punish him. I wanted him to feel just as awful as I did, so I seized on my own silence like a weapon.

“It was all just a fluke, then,” says Levi. “A misunderstanding.”

But I shake my head. It wasn’t a misunderstanding. Maybe it was in the heat of that moment, but the rest of it was on us. I was too stubborn, too proud to try to fix anything. And Levi—I think he was just scared. He’d always avoided any kind of conflict, always felt everything so deeply, so viscerally when we were kids. All I can think is that these plans he made, the molds he made himself fit into, were an easy way to push those feelings out.

An easy way to push me out. And once I was out, I was determined to stay gone.

“We had so much time to fix it,” I murmur, more to myself than to him. It’s almost worse, knowing his side of this story. Understanding we didn’t waste all this time because of a mistake. We wasted all this time because of who we are as people. Who we are in our bones.

“We still have time,” says Levi. “And we’ve been starting to fix it, haven’t we?”

There’s a smile tugging at my lips, but it’s aching and sad. “We’ve been playing pretend.”

“If I’m being honest, June, I wasn’t playing at anything.” Levi’s throat bobs. “Those moments that made us go viral? Not one of them was staged. Maybe Sana told us to be there. But every single one of them was just us.”

He’s right. But it doesn’t change the fact that we had to pretend to care about each other to even let ourselves care. This entire time, we’ve had a safety net under us. If it ever felt like we were coming too close or going too far, we always had the option of saying it was for the sake of our pact. What we’re saying now is so outside of that safety net that if we stumble, we’re going to freefall.

“I look at those pictures and I almost don’t recognize myself,” says Levi. “I haven’t felt this happy in a long time.”

“I’m glad for that. I really am. But I’m worried,” I admit. “That this is all just—a vacation to you. That this is all happening really, really fast.”

I stand by what I said—that I don’t think anyone should have to be settled to be loved. But I know Levi. This isn’t just his life in flux, the way it’s been since Kelly cheated on him. This is Levi making a choice that seems bolder than any he’s made in years. It feels reckless. It feels unlike him. And if I’m going to have Levi, I want Levi—not some temporary version of him I might lose when he comes to his senses. Not one that might be as easy to lose as he was all those years ago, when we let our pride and our fear get in the way.

“How about this, then.” Levi takes a step closer to me, and it feels like it isn’t just bridging the gap between us right now, but the careful, quiet one we’ve kept between us since he got back. “Let’s take the whole… moving back thing off the table. We take all of it off the table, even,” he says. “We just take it one step at a time. You and me.”

I stay rooted in place, but my head tilts up to his like there’s something magnetic in it, something that couldn’t pull my eyes off his if I tried. “We don’t even know what that looks like anymore,” I say, still cautious.

“If that means we’re friends, that means we’re friends. But June…” He reaches out and holds the tips of my fingers with his hand, light and searching. “What I felt for you then? What I feel for you now? It never went away.”

My fingers curl around his on instinct, pulling both of his hands into mine, pulling him closer to me.

“Me neither,” I say quietly.

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