Page 27 of Heartthrobs Don't Date Wallflowers
“Do you move a lot too?”
“In a sense,” he said slowly. “I mean… I didn’t move a lot when I was a kid but I have been lately. We’ll definitely be living in this house for the next two years, but we’ll be traveling a lot in the summer again, which means the only people I’ll have around to talk to are my...” He paused. “Uh, my siblings.”
“Been there,” I said. “My sister’s my best friend. I still call her every day.”
“Hence how you accidentally called me,” he said. I could hear the smile in his voice. “So, if you call her every day, she must not live with you, right?”
I froze. I’d gotten so comfortable in chatting with him that I hadn’t been thinking about what information I was okay with him knowing. Not that Poppy not living with me was some big secret or anything, but I didn’t like that it was out there now, whether I wanted it to be or not. I was never the kind of person to just speak without thinking like that—except when I was him, apparently.
I couldn’t leave the question hangingin the air like that, so I cleared my throat and tried to say in a casual voice, “Uh, no, she goes to school in another town.”
“College?”
For a second, I considered lying and saying yes, so I wouldn’t have to reveal more personal information than I wanted to. But if I did that, then I would have to keep up with the lie. I’d have to pretend she was older than me and fake my way through every follow-up question he was bound to ask me. I could probably manage it but I would be stressful and… well, I didn’t want to lie to him. I supposed Icould, but it made my stomach twist.
“No,” I said, before I could talk myself out of it. “Actually, she goes to boarding school.”
“But you don’t?”
“She asked my parents if she could go,” I said. “Wanted more stability than moving around a couple years. Personally, I thought boarding school sounded worse.”
He chuckled. “My sister did the same. But it was after—” He cut off so suddenly that I checked to make the call hadn’t dropped.
“After what?” I asked.
He was silent for a long minute and I worried I’d pressed too hard by asking. He’d stopped talking, after all. My mind filled in the possible blank—after one of his parents died. After they’d moved to a new place. After…
After anything. Because I didn’t know him and I definitely didn’t know his life.
He cleared his throat. “Uh, after this big thing happened to me. It’s too long of a story to tell now.”
I could read between the lines of that one: he couldn’t tell me because it would reveal too much.
I couldn’t be mad that he didn’t want to share. If I had any secrets, I wouldn’t share them either right now. But I found myself wishing he would tell me anyway, desperately wanting to know anything he would be willing to share with me.
I paused for a second, then asked softly, “What’s one thing I’d know if I knew you?”
I was worried he was going to shut me down right away, but he hummed, like he was genuinely thinking it over. For some reason, that made my heart flutter. “If you knew me, you’d know I hate the taste of coffee but drink at least three cups a day.”
“Need the caffeine?”
“That, and when I first met my friend Luca, he bought me a coffee and I didn’t want to offend him by telling him I don’t drink coffee,” he said.Luca. The name sounded familiar but I wasn’t sure why. “So, he kept buying them for me and now here we are, two years later.”
I remembered the text he’d sent in the group chat earlier and grinned.Rob says we can stop for coffee. I probably wouldn’t have remembered it if I hadn’t re-read it a thousand times, trying to figure out if it was really him, but it was funny now that I knew more. It was too bad I couldn’t say that to him without revealing the whole group chat thing—which I could only assume he hadn’t noticed I’d been added to as well.
Even if a little piece of me wanted him to notice too.
“So, three cups a day,” I said. “Does he make you that much coffee every day or do you just drink it to keep up the act?”
“A little bit of both. He’ll buy me coffee any time he goes to Starbucks or he’ll make me a mug whenever he makes it, and then I’ve gotten so used to having that much caffeine that Ihaveto drink it that much.”
“Do you live with him?” I asked.
“What?” He sounded genuinely surprised and maybe even a little angry, and I realized it was probably because I’d asked something more personal than we’d been talking about before.
“Uh, you said he makes you a mug every time he makes coffee so I just… Never mind, forget I asked.”
“It’s fine,” he said. “Sorry. I was just surprised you… Uh, yeah, I do live with him. That’s part of the whole my-sister-going-to-boarding-school story I mentioned earlier.”
