I frown. “You don’t really know anything about our relationship, so I don’t know how you can say that it’s stupid.”
“I know enough to know that you’ve been pining after that guy for over a year and you finally have him. And shh—” She stops me from interrupting. “Deny it all you want, but I know that it’s true. Are you really going to panic and take off the second that he admits he likes you? Talk about throwing away a good thing for the stupidest reason I’ve ever heard.”
“You don’t know the whole story.”
“Then tell me the whole story,” she says.
I wish that I could, but I can’t. Not without opening myself up to more questions, which would ruin the surprise for her and Ryan. Then all of this would be for nothing. I try to find a way to tiptoe around it.
“He thinks that everything is a big joke,” I tell her. It might not be the entire truth, but the way I feel about it is real. “He just wants to have fun and I want the real thing. It hurts because I love him and he uses that against me. It’s like he doesn’t care at all how much that hurts me.”
I hear the words as they leave my mouth, but it takes a moment for their meaning to register. I’m not even sure they’re true until they’re spoken out loud, hanging in the air between me and Tina. When it hits me, my eyes go wide. I look up at Tina. She watches me for a moment. She takes a drink, frowns at something out in the yard, and then looks back at me. “Does he know that you feel that way?”
“I… I don’t know.”
“I’ve just learned that men sometimes need things spelled out for them,” she says. “They’re not mind readers, as much as we wish they were. Take me, for example. That’s why I’m not waiting for Ryan to propose to me.”
“That’s different. You and Ryan are meant to be together. I guess what Oliver and I have is fizzling out.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re having your first fight as a couple,” Tina says. “I see the way you look at each other. What you have is most definitely not fizzling out.”
I’m not expecting how much of a fight Tina puts up over me breaking off my fake relationship with Oliver. I just need this whole thing to be over so that I can move on, but she makes a good point. If this were a real relationship, I wouldn’t be giving up so easily. This probably wouldn’t have even been a fight.
“And a word of advice,” she continues. “Don’t sleep in separate rooms tonight.”
“Why not?”
“If there’s any part of you that wants it to work out with him, then just trust me on this. Don’t sleep in separate rooms.”
ChapterTwenty-Five
Somewhere Along the Way
Idon’t see Oliver before I head to bed tonight, but I can see the evidence that he’s been around the house. His boots are by the front door, fresh dirt caked on the soles. He must have gone for a walk while Tina and I were in the hot tub. The game we were playing has been put away, the box tucked back into its spot next to the fireplace.
I go upstairs. I hesitate when I reach the room with the bunk beds. I look down the hall toward the other room. I wonder if Oliver is in there right now. Maybe he’s sleeping, or maybe he’s lying awake. He’s probably asleep. He’s not as bothered about what happened as I am. I think about what Tina said.Don’t sleep in separate rooms. With a sigh, I open the door to the bunk bed room and go in anyway. I lie down on the narrow bed and stare up at the bottom of the bunk above me.
All week, I had been thinking about this moment. It was supposed to be the first night that Oliver and I spent together, sharing a bed. During the week leading up to this trip, I wouldn’t have guessed that things would escalate with him the way they did earlier. I imagined it being awkward, us lying in bed next to each other, while I pretend that I don’t have feelings for him and we both pretend that we do. We would lie on our backs, each trying our hardest not to roll too much and bump the other. My mind would be spinning, and he would probably fall asleep first. Then eventually I would drift off to sleep too, and maybe we would wake up and find that we had both moved in our sleep, and in the cold night found warmth with each other.
But then after what happened in the shower, my fantasy of how tonight might go changed. I imagined that we would head upstairs to bed together, but we wouldn’t fall asleep. There wouldn’t be any awkward lying side by side, each of us too afraid to touch the other person. We would undress each other slowly, and then he would ease into me, and we would spend all weekend like that until the idea of using twenty condoms in two days didn’t seem so ridiculous anymore.
Somewhere along the way, this fantasy failed to address my real feelings for him. I guess I had this dumb idea that I wouldn’t need to say anything. We would let our bodies do the talking. There would be an unspoken change from a fake relationship to a very real one, and both of us would somehow know when that change took place and neither of us would have to bring it up.
How naïve of me to think that would work.
I roll over, facing the wall. I know that Oliver is on the other side. I wonder again if he’s asleep yet. I wonder if he’s bothered at all that I’m not in the room with him. Maybe this distance away from me is good for him and he’ll be over our fight by the morning.
* * *
I wake up to the sound of the bedroom door opening. I’m cocooned inside a blanket and pressed against the wall, so I don’t know that it’s morning until I lift the blanket off my face and see the light coming in through the window.
I look at Oliver. He stands in the doorway, still holding onto the door.
“Haven’t you ever heard of knocking?” I grumble.
“I did knock,” he says. “You didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure if you were in here.”
I watch him for a moment. His hair is messy and his eyes are hooded. “You look tired.”
