Page 81 of Northern Stars

People break up in life, Aiden.That doesn’t mean you have to be a total dickhead.

“What’s the matter with you?” I shot back. “I’m trying to be nice.”

“You should stop trying. It’s not working.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You’re being a dick.”

“Good. Then maybe you’ll leave me alone.”

“I—”

“We aren’t doing this.”

“Stop cutting me off!”

“Then finish a fucking thought!” he hammered back, his veins popping out of his neck.

“I would if you wouldn’t cut me the heck off! Geez! I came to bring you a pair of shoes, you jerk. You don’t have to be like that. I figured after all this time, we could maybe be on good terms, but—”

“We aren’t.”

“Stop cutting me off,” I said once again.

His brow knitted, and he glanced at my foot blocking him from closing the door. Then he looked back at me. “Move your foot.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Hailee,” he sternly said. Hearing his lips say my name? It was a new kind of heartbreak because he used to say it so gently. “Move. Your. Foot.”

I moved it.

He slammed the door in my face, leaving me standing there with a shoebox in my grip and my ego buried six feet under.

As I walked away, his door swung open, and he called after me again. I turned toward him, hopeful that he’d come to his senses and was ready to apologize to me for being so cold and nasty.

He approached me slowly, and with each step he took, my heart began pounding faster and faster within my chest. He was so close that my mind made up a crazy idea for a second that he would lean in and kiss me right then and there. That he’d been fighting a war in his mind, and his outburst was just because he didn’t know how to act around me after all this time. That his lips missed my taste so much that he was going to fall back into me.

Fall into me, Aiden.

He hovered over me. His blue eyes narrowed, and his chest puffed out. His full lips parted as he whispered, “I am in town for the next few months, and I want to make something extremely clear, okay?”

I swallowed the lump that sat in my throat. “Okay.”

He moved in closer. His hot breaths brushed against my skin as every hair on my body stood straight. “I want nothing to do with you. I don’t need you checking in on me just because you work here, I don’t need you buying me shoes because you can’t hold your liquor, and I don’t want to reconnect and talk about the good ole days with you, Hailee. You are nothing to me, and I am nothing to you. We are strangers, and I am not interested in knowing anything about you at all. Am I clear?”

My lips parted as I tried to keep my composure. “Crystal,” I replied, standing as tall as I could, which somehow still left me feeling so little.

He released a low grumble of annoyance before turning and walking back into his room, leaving me there to gather the small bit of dignity I had left.

When did that happen? When did the sweetest boy I’d ever known turn into such a cold, cold man? The rest of the world would’ve been shocked to see how harsh Aiden could’ve been to a person, to me. But I guessed that was why he had his Oscar. His acting skills truly showed his range.

“It was that bad?”Mama asked during dinner at my parents’ house. Recently, we’d been rewatchingI Love Lucyonce a week at my parents’ place while Dad was doing some accounting work down at the bakery.

“I threw up on his shoes, and then today he told me he wanted nothing to do with me. In a very mean way.”

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