Page 84 of The Game Plan

I blink. “How could I what? Stand up for you? Prove you were provoked?”

“You barged in there! You had no right!” He’s breathing hard, his face red. His hands clench into fists at his side. “I was handling it. I had it covered.”

“Except you didn’t,” I tell him. “They were going to throw the book at you.”

“I was fine!”

“We have proof that someone in the volleyball house is starting shit about you online,” I remind him. “That’s not nothing. O’Rourke has been targeting you for weeks.”

“It’s fine. I can deal with it.”

“But you shouldn’t have to.” I reach for him, and he flinches back. “We’re in this thing together. You stood up for me. Why won’t you let me stand up for you, too?”

“We’re not,” he says, taking a step back.

“We’re not what?”

“We’re not in this together. It’s just me,” he says. “I’m by myself in this. It’s my ass on the line here, Sam, not yours.”

“Miles. This is how a relationship works. We lean on one another.”

His eyes are sad. He looks broken down. Defeated.

“Then maybe we shouldn't be in a relationship anymore.”

Um, what? What the actual fuck is this about?

He turns and walks away.

“Miles!” I chase after him, stopping him in his tracks. “We need to talk about this.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” he says firmly. Resigned. “I don’t want to do this with you.”

Flabbergasted, I stare at him. We’ve been on the same page every step of the way, and all of a sudden, he’s ripping pages out of the book.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He sighs. His eyes cloud with remorse. “It means I’m done.”

Tamar comes home to find me sitting on the couch in my pajamas, crying into a pint of ice cream.

“Oh, honey,” she says, taking a seat beside me. “What happened?”

“He—he—” I can’t get the words out. I break off into tears again.

“Yeah, she’s been like this for a few hours,” Lex says from the armchair, where she’s been watching over me like a protective hawk. “I don’t know what happened, either.”

Saying the words will make it real. And I don’t want it to be real.

I thought I was doing the right thing. I was helping him. And he seems to think that I betrayed him instead.

“Let’s turn on Legally Blonde,” Tamar says in her soothing voice. “That will make everything better.”

She settles in beside me on the couch. Lex joins us and the three of us huddle together under a blanket as Elle Woods’s douchebag boyfriend breaks up with her.

It just makes me cry harder.

He broke up with me. I keep replaying it over and over again in my head. The sadness on his face. The resignation in his voice.

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