Page 65 of The Break-Up Pact

“That was uncalled for,” I tell him. “And a down-and-out lie.”

“June, don’t bullshit me,” he says, all the fake warmth out of his voice. It’s almost a relief to hear it—at least now we can cut the crap and have a real conversation. “Kelly told me the whole thing.”

I let out terse laugh. “Kelly? When on earth would you have talked to Kelly?”

Griffin is both furious and smug, and neither suits him. “She got in touch with me last week. We got dinner. She spilled the beans on your little scheme to make me look bad before we’d even ordered drinks.”

I can’t even process the bit about Kelly, stuck on Griffin’s accusation.

“Oh my god.” I laugh in earnest now, stepping back, incredulous. “You really think everything is about you, don’t you?”

Griffin’s face goes beet red. “Why else would you do it then, June? You didn’t talk to Levi for years, and then suddenly you’re all lovey-dovey?”

“And how exactly does that make you look bad, Griffin?” I ask, but the moment the words are out of my mouth it clicks. The last of the laughter tapers out of me. “It doesn’t. You know full well you did that all on your own. It’s just that you hate him. You dumped me, but you don’t want me to be happy with a guy you hate.”

Griffin shakes his head sharply. “I don’t want you to pull one over on me with a guy you hate.”

Now that I’m seeing him like this, stripped of all his niceties, his put-on charm, I’m almost terrified I didn’t see the extent of it earlier. That there might be some universe where I was willing to keep ignoring it, where I’d still be stuck trying to be the girlfriend I was never quite going to measure up to no matter how hard I tried.

It doesn’t matter. In this universe, I don’t have a single second left for him to waste.

“Let me be clear—this was never about you. And no matter how or why it started, Levi and I are together now.” I lean in just close enough to make the words stick. “I’d tell you to get over it, but I don’t plan on ever seeing you again.”

Only then does Griffin start to lose some of his bravado. Only then does it become clear that he’s been waiting all this time for me to bend the way I used to, even break the way I did when we broke up. Now I’m immovable, and Griffin doesn’t know how to interact with something he can’t move.

“I don’t see why you’re all bent out of shape about this,” says Griffin. “The way I see it, you and Levi played us, and now we’ve played you right back.”

There’s a hand on my shoulder. “Miss Hart, your car is here.”

On the quick drive to the hotel, I figure out the extent to which Griffin “played” us. A story about the Revenge Exes being fake has already hit the internet; the producers of Business Savvy must have had it planted for at least a week. There are photos of Levi going in and out of the apartment building, one where he has two cups of coffee in hand, another with Kelly smiling at his side. There are quotes from two different outlets confirming they got photos of us from the same source. And the rest of the special was spent essentially breaking down all that evidence for the live audience after they came back from commercial.

I’m numb to it all as I scroll, my phone blowing up with people calling one after the other—Levi, my parents, Dylan, Levi again, numbers I don’t even know. A text from Sana pops up, the only notification I bother opening: I got you a ticket for the 6pm bus back if you can make it.

I hope Sana is prepared for me to kiss her on the damn mouth the instant that bus turns in to Benson Beach.

I scramble for the backpack and the duffel bag I packed, desperate not to be in the city for even a second longer. Only when I spill out of the elevator into the massive lobby, I stop short.

There is Levi, his back turned to me, in a heated conversation with the concierge. The sight of him feels like turbulence, a wild current that can’t decide how to take shape. There’s the staggering relief. The innate part of me that sees Levi and instantly feels at ease. But then there’s something else pushing just under it. The something that made me dismiss his calls in the car, that made me so willing to seize that bus ticket Sana bought without giving him so much as a heads-up. Something that started as anger, maybe, but might be something deeper. Might be something worse.

When we made this break-up pact, the only thing we promised was to be honest with each other. And Levi wasn’t. I don’t mind that he told Kelly. I don’t even really care that she ratted us out. But Levi didn’t tell me that he told her, which means it could only have been motivated by one thing. He wasn’t telling her for the sake of clearing the air. He was telling her because there was a part of him, however slight, that still didn’t want what he had with Kelly to be over. And he didn’t tell me because he felt ashamed.

Maybe I’m wrong. I want so desperately to be wrong. But no matter what I am, I know I can’t have this conversation with him right now. It’s too fresh, too raw. If we talk about it now, it feels like so much else is going to get pulled up from the depths with it. Things I’d rather stay buried, because I’m terrified if we say them out loud, we’ll be over just as soon as we’ve begun.

The best thing I can do right now is go home. That’s what I tell myself, at least, when I turn to leave the hotel lobby and hear Levi’s voice from behind me: “June.”

One of my steps falters, but I keep walking.

“June, wait,” Levi calls.

I raise my hand for a taxi and one stops with astonishing speed. I pull the door open just as Levi catches up with me, his eyes brewing with worry, with regret.

“June,” he says one last time, and I shake my head—consider apologizing—but no. If I say one word to him, a whole lot more of them are going to follow, and I can’t have that conversation right now. I close the taxi door behind me, tell the driver the intersection for the bus stop, and watch Levi’s stricken face disappear.

Chapter Twenty-one

When I was younger, I had a very aggressive tree-climbing phase. There was one thick tree smack-dab in the middle of our woods with a tangle of branches that went up and up and up, so high that once you reached the top, you could see to the edges of our whole town—the little nucleus of Benson Beach’s main square that led out to the boardwalk, which wove into the narrow streets full of mismatched homes beyond it. The strip of the beach against the bright, staggering blue of the ocean spanning the bluer sky. I’d get to the top and feel the wind on my face, flooded with both a strange kind of terror and thrill—the fear of the height I’d climbed, but the satisfaction of having climbed it. The fear of the world being so much bigger than I thought it was, and the anticipation of everything it had in store. The fear of knowing I’d have to climb back down, and the comfort of knowing no matter how long it took, Levi would always be waiting patiently for me at the bottom.

I’ve thought about that tree-climbing phase a lot over the years. I’d use it to justify a lot of the reckless things Griffin talked me into. I used to do things that scared me all the time, I’d think to myself. I climbed that tree even when it terrified me. How is this any different?

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