Page 1 of Finally Loved

Chapter 1

Neve Davenport was being dumped.

She stared as the entire store around her became a blur. A moment ago, it had been televisions and laptops, speakers and hoovers. Now, it was Roxanne, dumping her, in the middle of a Best Buy.

Who got dumped in the middle of an electronics store?

Neve stared at Roxanne’s lips. It wasn’t the first time she’d done that, but it was the first time she’d done it likethis.

They kept moving, talking, like her words weren’t tearing apart everything Neve had thought she’d known when Roxanne had picked her up and brought her here.

She almost groaned. Roxanne hadbroughther here. She couldn’t at least have had the courtesy to drive her home first? Was she planning on leaving Neve here? Abandoning her in the middle of the mall? Or was she still planning on driving her home?

As Neve felt the floor swaying beneath her feet, her face burned. Her weekend bag was in Roxanne’s car. She hadn’t beenplanning on going home.Roxannehad told her not to plan on going home. She’d texted all night, talking about being desperate to see Neve today and how she really needed some retail therapy with herfavorite girl in the world. She’d talked about what they’d have for dinner tonight. What they’d have for breakfast on Sunday morning.

None of it had felt wrong. None of it had felt like a lie.

Sure, there had been the slight pang that struck up in Neve’s heart when Roxanne mentioned the friends she was out with, always caveated with the fact that she couldn’t tell them about Neve yet, but that had been the case for the entire nine months they’d been dating. It didn’t matter that it made Neve’s insides squirm uncomfortably. She’d had nine months of being Roxanne’s dirty little secret. It wasn’t going away.

Except, now, it was.

And not in the way Neve had hoped for.

It wasn’t that she was trying to force Roxanne out of the closet before she was ready or safe. Neve understood that she couldn’t tell her family yet. She’d understood every time Roxanne spoke about them, every time she’d returned from being around them, filled with tales of barely veiled—sometimes entirely unveiled—homophobic things they’d said. It wasn’t safe around them. Roxanne wasn’t safe around them.

But her friends? That had never made any sense at all. They were all forward-thinking. All completely accepting. From the one time Neve had accidentally met them—a moment she preferred not to think about thanks to the look of complete horror on Roxanne’s face when they’d run into a handful of her friends at a movie theater—they seemed nice. Neve had even wondered whether a couple of them might also be queer. But Roxanne had insisted. She’d wanted to keep Neve safe and separate. And Neve hadn’t ever wanted to push her too hard.

Maybe she’d just never wanted the answers to questions she knew better than to ask.

“I just don’t think it’s going to work, you know?” Roxanne said.

Neve struggled to refocus on Roxanne’s whole face. It wasn’t as though she spent every moment of their relationship imagining this happening, but, if she had imagined it, she’d have imagined Roxanne seeming a little more… emotional? Invested, perhaps. A little less indifferent, and a little more like she was breaking up with the person she’d just spent nine months of her life supposedly in love with.

Did people do this to the ones they loved?

Or was this a particular kind of torture reserved especially for Neve?

“Why?” she asked, her voice croaky and uncomfortable. For as little emotion as Roxanne seemed to have about the breakup, Neve was overflowing with it.

Roxanne tilted her head. Something about the movement seemed patronizing. She smiled slightly—who smiled when they were dumping someone?

Neve hated it.

“Come on, Ne-Ne. You know why.”

Neve’s blood ran cold, and not just because the nickname felt like a knife being driven into her heart. Part of their cover, their plausible deniability if they ran into other people when they were out together, was never to use nicknames in public because then you couldn’t slip up in front of other people. One of Roxanne’s many rules.

And Neve had gone along with all of them.

But that wasn’t what hurt the most.

She’d heard that line before. She’d told Roxanne about that line. It was the line she’d used in explanation for why she wasn’t interested in dating when she and Roxanne first met. It was theline she wore like armor around her heart. If she used it for defensive purposes, that same sentiment could never hurt her again.

Or so she’d thought.

Roxanne ran her finger along the shelf to her left. Neve couldn’t even register what was on the shelf.

“Do I?” she managed to whisper, feeling all the ways her heart was cracking—all the ways she felt likeshewas cracking. Crumbling into a million pieces from yet another partner dumping her because she wasn’t…normal.

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