Page 5 of The Break-Up Pact

Chapter Three

Pro tip: Never sign an on-camera release without reading the fine print.

It’s weird to think it was only three months ago that Griffin got picked for Business Savvy in the first place. The details of the reality show are all blurry to me now—he pitched some vague startup idea, went for an in-person audition, and was pretty much swept off to Manhattan to start filming the next day.

When he left, I wasn’t worried about anything other than missing him. Griffin’s always been Griffin: personable, aggressive, driven. He may not have been spilling over with brilliant ideas, but I still expected him to come home with some kind of good news, even if he didn’t win.

I did not expect him to come home with some absurdly beautiful woman named Lisel, who sat with him on my bright pink couch as he held her hand and told me she was the “love of his life” while three cameras were trained on us. Nor did I expect for Business Savvy to be a runaway hit, thanks in part to Griffin and Lisel “merging both their startup ideas and their hearts.” And I certainly didn’t expect when our break-up episode aired two weeks ago that my crying face would get turned into a meme on every social media platform the world over, where I’ve been both mocked as a naïve fool and revered as the new Patron Saint of Women Who Have Been Cheated On.

In defense of the meme, I did look pretty ridiculous. Blotchy-cheeked, snot dribbling down my face, eyes so full of tears that I could have opened my own water park. All they needed were a bunch of close-range shots of my theatrical sobs, and boom, an internet sensation was born.

The volcanic meltdown wasn’t even about the heartbreak. It was the shock. The complete and utter disbelief not just to be betrayed like that, but in my own home, by someone I’d loved for so long I never once thought to question the feeling. It was the bone-deep and immediately crushing realization that so much of what I thought I knew about my life was wrong.

I look back and can’t help thinking I should have been better prepared for it. I have experience with the ground dropping out from under me. Losing Annie wasn’t just losing my sister—it was losing a piece of everything in my world. When you have a sister, you don’t realize how much of the way you think, the way you exist, is framed not just by your own thoughts, but hers. Don’t realize how much of her colors the way you look at the world until she isn’t in it, and you’re staring at all the same people and places you’ve known your entire life and trying to recognize some new version of them, with the old colors gone.

But losing Annie was something that happened to me. Getting thrown to the wolves was something Griffin did to me. It wasn’t an unfair, random, scary happening in the universe. It was deliberate. It was planned.

And somehow, I still can’t bring myself to hate him for it. It would be easier if I could. But then I’d have to play more than the “what if” game. I’d have to peer at every single moment in the past ten years I chose to spend with Griffin. I’d have to acknowledge the way he never wanted to talk about the future further than our next trip, the way he called me his travel buddy as often as he called me his girlfriend. The way he encouraged me to do things that scared me, but often pushed me further than I was prepared to go. The way I knew our relationship was always missing something, that essential spark that people in love seem to have, but I had just grown too familiar with the idea of us to worry about it.

I’d have to look at all those flags in every shade of red and be every bit as mad at myself for ignoring them.

By mile six of my morning run, it’s only this anger and the guava iced tea I chugged sustaining me. I’m so far in my own spiraling thoughts that I don’t even notice two figures running toward me on the beach until a familiar voice crows, “June!”

Dylan waves at me with both hands, effusive as ever. I’m surprised to see him out here—seven in the morning is late for him. We may be siblings, but god only knows what was in the genes he absorbed in the womb. He’s basically what happens when the Energizer Bunny has an affair with the Hulk and their love child subsequently marries a gallon of cold brew coffee to make another child. He’s never not on the move, whether he’s up at the crack of dawn swimming on the beach or coaching the university’s track and cross-country teams or doing pull-ups on any mounted pole he sees.

He’d be positively insufferable if he didn’t also happen to have the personality of a Labrador retriever and a heart of gold. Well—gold and massive amounts of cake pop–flavored protein powder.

“Look who it is!” Dylan calls, and only then do I realize the person running next to him is none other than Levi.

My pace falters once he comes closer into view. His hair is damp and tousled with sweat, his face gleaming in the early morning sun. But it’s the gym shorts and the sleeveless shirt that inconveniently draw my eyes to places I’m unused to roaming—his toned shoulders, the new angles cut into his lean arms, the steady flex of his legs moving against the sand.

Technically, I’m no stranger to these parts of Levi. We all had to wear itty-bitty scraps of uniforms back in high school, when Levi and Dylan and I were all on the cross-country team. I clear my throat, trying to be as casual about it as I was back then, but then Levi gets close enough that I can see the beads of sweat collecting on his skin. One of them slides down his collarbone and it takes everything in me not to stare at it traveling under his shirt, not to imagine its path as it slides down farther.

I blink away, then almost laugh at myself. I haven’t had thoughts like this about someone’s body in—well, ever. It must be a side effect of being away from Levi for all these years. Maybe now my brain is just overcompensating for the lost time by trying to account for every inch of him it possibly can.

Yes. That’s it and only it. And if Levi’s eyes happen to linger on my own bare legs, that’s probably all it is for him, too.

I’ve only just managed to collect myself by the time we all come to a stop. “Guess I missed my invite?” I ask lightly.

Levi opens his mouth, but Dylan beats him to it, patting Levi on the back hard enough to bruise. “I ran into him on the way to the gym and dragged him out here. I didn’t even realize he was back in town!”

As far as I know, Levi’s been in better touch with Dylan than he has been with me, but that’s not saying much. Still, that’s the thing about Dylan—it’s not even that he can’t hold a grudge. He is physically incapable of forming one in the first place.

I raise my eyebrows, turning toward Levi without actually looking at him. “That makes two of us.”

Dylan is still grinning, blissfully unaware of the tension as Levi tries and fails to meet my eye. “We should definitely make this a morning thing, then,” says Dylan. “Just like the good old days.”

I nudge my sneaker into the sand. “If Levi’s actually sticking around.”

I feel the weight of Levi’s gaze on me when he says, “I’m here for a few weeks. Renting out the first floor of the blue condo on the boardwalk.”

That’s only two doors down from Tea Tide. I can’t help but wonder if that was on purpose, or just all that was available.

“Excellent,” says Dylan as an alarm goes off on his watch. He’s so easily distractible that Mateo programmed it to remind him when his shifts started. “I gotta book it to practice. Nice to have you back, Levi. See you around!”

And then Dylan unceremoniously takes off like a rocket, leaving me and Levi standing open-mouthed on the empty beach in his wake.

It feels too abrupt to start running again, so I start walking back in the direction I came at a fast clip. Levi falls into step beside me so easily that for a moment, I feel like the world is slipping into old versions of itself. Like if I close my eyes right now, listen to the lap of the waves, and feel the spray of the wind on my cheeks, I could open them to all the other countless times I walked this beach with Levi. When we were kids looking for spots to build sandcastles. Preteens belly flopping on our boogie boards. Teenagers racing each other during long practices.

---