Page 45 of The Break-Up Pact
The words stun me with their intensity. With the way that ghost of a touch seems to make every one of them spread like electricity under my skin.
“I know,” I tell him quietly, because I did. He was always there in the phone I didn’t pick up to call, the gap I was too proud to bridge. It’s why I thought of him in all those moments. Why it was so natural, so easy, to fall into him the day of Annie’s funeral without saying a word. “I knew.”
He nods. “Good,” he says.
Then he turns himself from me, going very still, clutching his empty glass like it’s anchoring him to the bar. Like he’s doing the exact same thing I’m doing right now and letting the regret of the past few years settle in with a new kind of weight.
I reach out and put my hand over his, weave my fingers through it. His eyes sweep over to mine and I feel the pulse of it then, tight between our fingers, steady between our gazes. The unshakable part of us that somehow endured all these years of barely speaking. The part that always will.
“You know you’ve got me, too,” I say.
And then that faded smile comes back, easing onto his face like the sun easing back out from behind a cloud. I squeeze his hand one more time before I let it go.
“I know you have to go back to the city and your real life at some point,” I say. “But I hope we can still be like this. Hang out whenever one of us is around. Catch up, even, on all the things we missed.”
Levi nods, then leans in conspiratorially. “You know,” he says, “there’s even a wild contraption called a phone. So even when we’re not in the same city, we can still catch each other up on our lives. Like magic.”
“We’ll see if you’ll ever have enough time for that, busy business guy,” I say.
Levi says without missing a beat, “I’ll make time.”
My throat feels thick then, because I can tell he means it. I just don’t know if he’ll be able to follow through with it. It’s all well and good to say we’ll stay in touch, but this is just more uncharted territory for us. I don’t want our friendship to get lost in it again.
Someone taps a mic from the other side of the bar. We break apart, glancing up to see the blue and green teams in a dead tie, the actual sports fans around us on the edges of their seats. We duck out toward trivia just as something happens with the football that makes half the room cheer and half of them groan and all of them chug their beers.
Levi tilts his head toward the other side for me to grab us a spot and says, “I’ll get the next round.”
He heads over to the bar, but when I scan the other side of the room, I come up empty of any free tables. I’m about to settle for hovering by the wall when a team in matching hot pink T-shirts that read TEAM FORTY WAYS TO FUNDAY waves me over to their table.
“Are you looking to join a team, darlin’?” asks a woman with a blond pixie cut and a sleeve of flower tattoos. “Because we have the space.”
“I should probably warn you that I’m terrible at trivia,” I tell her. The first and last night Mateo ever took me out with his team, my only helpful contribution was polishing off the nachos.
“You also don’t seem to be in your forties, but we’ll make allowances.” She narrows her eyes at me, looking me up and down as I settle onto another stool. “Do we know each other?”
I actually got this a lot even before we went viral. Benson Beach is a small town, and most people in it have popped into the shop at least once or twice. “Have you ever been to Tea Tide?”
The name instantly sparks her recognition. “Oh! You’re one of those…” She snaps her fingers. “Vengeance Exes, aren’t you?”
We’ve never actually been recognized in public outside of Tea Tide and the boardwalk before, so I can’t help but laugh. “Yeah, I’m June,” I say.
She lets out a howling laugh of her own and pats me on the back hard enough to give Dylan a run for his money. “Pam,” she introduces herself. “Now where’s your other half?”
Right on cue, Levi arrives with two more Blue Moons in hand—his with one orange slice on the rim, mine with a whole party of them. He takes the slice off his glass, his eyes crinkling with mischief before he puts it directly in my mouth. I’m so caught off guard that my tongue accidentally grazes the tips of his fingers, and if I’m not mistaken, his cheeks go every bit as pink as mine. I wonder if he feels the same slight shiver up his spine in the aftermath of it, too.
“Well, shit,” says Pam. I look up to find most of Forty Ways to Funday looking at Levi, like they alternately want to pinch his cheeks and pinch a whole lot of other places. “You two really are cute as a button.”
I hope the goodwill of that cuteness is enough to make up for the fact that, as far as trivia team members go, Levi and I are dead weight. Between my nonstop traveling and working and Levi living in his little Ivy League–finance bro bubble, the two of us are so laughably unaware of broader pop culture that we might as well have been dropped here from Mars. It wouldn’t be so bad if Forty Ways to Funday didn’t have a group rule that for every question you personally get wrong, you have to take a drink—Levi and I have drained our beers in no time, the two of us both so mutually sheepish that we’re practically caving in on each other, like we’re protecting the rest of the bar from our failure.
“Aw, shit, Pam. The kids are dry,” says one of our team members, picking up my empty glass and tilting it.
Levi shifts to get off his stool for another round, and I’m already disappointed at the loss of his leg pressed against mine when Pam puts a hand on Levi’s shoulder to stop him.
“Other rule is if you’ve gotten enough wrong to drain your glass, you have to do a dare of the group’s choosing,” she tells us.
I laugh. We’re two beers and a deep well of shame into the night, so I don’t even bother asking where this rule came from. “I dare us to get an answer right.”
“I dare us to stop trying to answer at all,” says Levi.
