Page 11 of Made Man

Wyatt’s jaw tics.

“No one important. Right, Wyatt?” I stare him down—right back—and the blood that sank to my feet reverses course, like a swimmer kicking off a wall, flooding my head, pounding in my ears, and ballooning in my brain.

I want to snatch the beer bottle that he’s holding on to for dear life out of his hand and smash it over his head.

I want to stab him with a jagged shard until his heart is ground meat, too.

“Mira,” he says, his voice gruff and raw and lost. My name in his mouth sounds exactly like it used to—like he still loves me with every cell in his body. Like he’s still the same big, fat liar, or I’m the same deluded idiot.

“No!” I step forward and slap his chest. I was aiming for his face, but my visual spatial skills must be on the fritz along with my pride. I feel eighteen again, reckless and hormonal, like my skin doesn’t fit, and my rage is a mushroom cloud, and my heart is as fragile as a robin’s egg.

He’smine, but he’s a stranger. He became some whole other personwithout me.

I let my hands fly again, but he grabs my wrists and pins them to his chest, dragging me close, bending to press his forehead firmly against mine.

“It’s okay, Mira,” he says, which is a joke and a lie and he knows it.

Thank the Lord, head bro and company decide this is private and back off, leaving us alone on this side of the high-top table.

Wyatt gently lowers my arms to my side, keeping a grip on my wrists to hold me close. His belly bumps mine when he breathes. His shaved cheek rasps against my forehead as he lifts his nose to subtly sniff my shampoo. He used to do that all the time, and I thought little things like that meant everything, but they didn’t.

“Let me go,” I snarl.

He releases my wrists, but he doesn’t step back and neither do I. His brown chukka boots kiss the toes of my strappy silver sandals.

“You look the same but different,” he says on an exhale.

He doesn’t get to say it that way, like he’s so surprised that I’ve changed. He walked away, and I grew up. That’s what people do. They get older. They get perspective. They get over shit.

Everybody but me.

Because he walked away without a word, left me on read and blocked me. Left for college and never looked back. Because unlike every other sixteen-year-old in the world, I wasright—I was never going to love another man.

I dart my hand out, shove it into his front right pocket, and snatch out his phone. He startles, but he doesn’t try to get it back. I tap in his password. 12-8-13. Terry Bradshaw’s number and my birthday.

It still works.

I open his contacts and scroll to the Ms, expecting any second for him to yank it back, but all he does is watch me, a strangeexpression on his face, bemused and desperate and tormented all at the same time.

There I am. Mira-baby. He didn’t delete me.

I unblock myself.

His notifications light up with my undelivered messages, and I shove the screen in his face, too close for him to read, but I don’t care.

“You’re a fucking coward, Wyatt Foster.”

He grabs my wrists, gently lowering the phone between us. His eyes catch on my hair. “You cut it shorter now,” he says.

It’s longer than it was right after he bailed when I chopped it all off and dyed it brown, and it didn’t make me feel the slightest bit better. “I hate you,” I say.

“You’re even prettier now.”

“Fuck you.”

He has nothing to say to that. He never could argue for shit. When we’d fight, he’d just get quiet and wait until I wasn’t quite as mad, and then he’d drag me onto his lap and wrap his arms around me and silently feel sorry at me until I decided he’d suffered enough. But we were kids then, and he hadn’t ripped my heart out and blown town with it yet.

“You could have at least said goodbye,” I mumble even though it wouldn’t have been nearly enough. “You could have been man enough to say it to my face.”

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