Page 104 of How to Walk Away

I wanted to tell her. Badly. I wanted to give her the slow-mo replay of every single significant moment and spend the rest of the car ride and even the next several days analyzing the data into submission. I could see many vastly different, totally contradictory interpretations of Ian’s behavior (and choices, and tone of voice, and facial expressions), and I had no clue which one was right.

But I couldn’t tell her.

Kit had no real sense of privacy. I tried to chalk it up to exuberance—if she had the goods, she just had to share—but she was a little gossipy, too. She also gabbed on the cell phone all the time with no sense of who might be nearby listening. And do not get me started on her issues with Instagram.

I did not doubt that Myles would try to take away Ian’s license if heever got wind of what had happened. I’d seen him menacing Ian in the gym every day for weeks. I’d watch him trying to provoke Ian, needling him, pushing his buttons, hoping to goad him into doing something stupid, and I’d think, “That’s a lot of anger.”

I felt a little sorry for Myles, and the way something in his life compelled him to seek vengeance instead of just moving on. But I felt sorrier for Ian. Myles really was a revenge-driven prick.

Mostly, that was a problem for Ian, but it was a problem for me today, because it meant I couldn’t do the one thing I wanted more than anything in the world to do right then: tell Kitty everything.

She was waiting. “Were you hooking up, or what?”

“Sadly,” I said, “no.”

“No? What were you doing on the floor?”

“He tripped,” I said with a shrug, like,No big deal.

Kit squinted her eyes like she did not believe me at all.

I had to ramp it up. “You know those little rag rugs Mom has everywhere? He tripped on one at the threshold. And, seriously, then he managed to heroically catch me on the way down.”

Kit studied me out of the side of her eye. “Bullshit.”

“I swear,” I declared then, “on my wiggly big toe.”

That did it. “Okay,” she said. “So what was going on between you? Because the romantic tension was so thick you could wear it like a sweater.”

I told myself it wasn’t lying, exactly. It was just mushing up the truth. “At the bonfire, I confessed some feelings to him.”

“Yum,” Kit said. “I love confessed feelings.”

“I told him I had a huge, all-consuming, heart-wrenching crush and that he was basically the only thing I looked forward to all day.”

“Besides gourmet takeout with your sister.”

“Of course.”

“And what did he say?”

Now I was grateful to him. Because this shit was too good to make up. “He said: No, I didn’t.”

“No, you didn’t what?”

“No, I didn’t have a crush on him.”

Kit looked straight at me. “What the hell?”

“Eyes on the road, please.”

“Explain!”

“He said I onlythoughtI had a crush on him, and that this kind of thing happens all the time, and my life has been pulverized and so I’m grasping at any straws of happiness I can, but once I get through this, I’ll realize that it was all in my head and I never had any real feelings for him at all. Not really.”

“He didnotsay that.”

“He did. Then he cited a whole bunch of studies from his training and basically told me that I was a teenage girl with Boy Band syndrome—thinking that some kindhearted prince was going to come in and take all my sorrows away.”

---