Page 55 of Our Hearts Knew Better

And he suddenly couldn’t look at me, as I looked at him clearer through a building haze. That storm swirled deep. As deep as his popped dimple with his frown. His face was flushed, and his hair was more than just breeze blown, like he’d been running his fingers through the strands. Stress strokes.

Levi was a tight ball of stress and I was trying not to unravel until he gave me the words to stop it.

He shoved both hands into his pockets, where I couldn’t reach them, his phone going, too, as my own was now fused to my fist. “There’s—” He swallowed again, his voice lowered and strained as his next words skewed everything I knew about him, everything I knew had happened between us. “There’s not a me and you. I don’t want there to be.”

My head shook as I tried to blink away the haze, not letting those words settle as theytriedto twist me up, but this didn’tmake sense. I was frozen in the burn of those twelve hits, my stare drifting and unfocused, unable to speak, and I wasn’t sure how long I just stood there before he had to be the one to speak again.

He said my name, and when I blinked back to his gaze, there was something not so dark peeking through the storm and he had shifted more toward me, like maybe he was going to take it back. Words he was putting too much effort into getting out.

He didn’t. He tightened his face again once I showed some life back in mine.

“What are you doing?” spoke my disbelief, finally. It reflected in him, like he wasn’t expecting me to question, or at least not in such a defiant way.

He bounced on antsy feet, a silent stutter in his mouth before he could even say something. Something not right. “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

I stepped back from the pity he put in his eyes.Not right.

“And you were drunk—”

“What?” A breath before the snap. “What?What are you…no.No.”

“Summer.” My name again, a soft beg that made me rigid, my head shaking so hard I felt dizzy.

“No,” I repeated. “Youkissedme. And I wasn’t drunk then. And what do you call what you’re doing now?” Tears fell, and he watched them roll down my cheeks, his only movement that muscle jerking in his jaw that used to beforme and against all my troubles. Now he was making himself one and no other move to stop my hurt feelings.

He looked almost…helpless.

There was something he wasn’t telling me. He was saying things he didn’t really believe or feel. He didn’t. He didn’tnotfeel for me.

“What’s wrong with you?” I could only whisper this one, a still too familiar and too stinging question. “What happened?” A sudden urgency moved me closer to him again. “Whatever it is, I can help fix it…”

He stepped back now, a small shake in his head, a hard blink of his eyes. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“What happened?” I stressed at that assurance, almost a rush of new air in my lungs, but they seized against a full breath at his stress back.

“We just can’t, Summer. I’m sorry,” he whispered, and it cracked every piece inside me that was still whole.

“But you said—” My voice broke and I sounded just like how he’d looked at me—pitiful. “You did—” He said and didso much.

Every conversation we’d had since the first flashed in my head, everything that told me he was falling for me as I was falling for him.

Everything he’d done for me and with me was right there,real, showing me the beats of his heart that were mine, showing me how I mattered to him. All the signals. . .

His smile at seeing me, just moments ago? That wasn’t the smile of a boy who wanted to break a girl’s heart.

“Everything’s real.” I quoted him, from just the other night, the way he squeezed my hand as he said it then now a sick clench in my stomach for how he was trying to ruin it, a flicker of that desperation then back in his eyes before it was gone.

But not this flicker of fire now in me.

“You said that. Everything was real,” I insisted, fought, pleaded against what he was saying this night. “I’m not stupid,” I pushed through my teeth, half confused over who I was trying to convince now, until I blinked the returned haze away and it was still Levi, again, tracking my tears. “Even if you hadn’t kissed me, I know you and I know you like me. Isawit and Ifeltit.”

“And that’s my fault,” he pushed back, a lift in his stiffened shoulders, as stiffened as his arms, and his hands that hadn’t left his pockets. “I shouldn’t have made you feel things I don’t.”

Gravel pressed into my shoe and I beared down to shift the pain but it was too centered. “Why are you doing this?” I pushed more, my voice staggered air, caught over him expecting me to believe he’d just been pretending to be a nice guy, some wolf in sheep’s clothing.

His mouth did that silent stutter thing, his howl weak. “I thought…I thought I did. Then we kissed and…I wasn’t feeling what I thought I was.”

“You’relying—”

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