“No, they didn’t, they were just being goofy.”
“Yeah, and that’s exactly how high school boys with crushes act. Goofy. Silly. Outlandish. Everything short of pulling your hair and sticking your braid in the inkwell.”
“I’m sorry, what year are you living in?” I demanded, and Zoe grinned at me.
“We can’t forget about Clark Jacobs,” Fiona added. “Prom king. I mean, the guy asked you to prom. How much more obvious can it get?”
“We were just friends!” I insisted. “It wasn’t a serious invitation.”
“Yeah, because you laughed at him when he asked you. After that, what choice did he have but to play it off? Way to kill a guy’s ego,” Zoe said.
“Oh, come on, I thought he was kidding around,” I sputtered. “He wasn’t serious, he was supposed to go with someone on the court, like Emma or Kayla.”
“He was serious until you broke his heart,” Fiona said. “After that, you sort of got a reputation for not wanting to date at all. But I know a bunch of guys that still had secret crushes on you all through high school. They used to corner me and ask me questions about you.”
“Why is this the first I’m hearing about it?”
“I didn’t bother saying anything to you because I knew exactly how you’d react.”
“No way…”
Zoe nodded. “I tried to tell you, Shan. You were completely oblivious.”
“And it’s still happening,” Fiona said, flipping through the photos. “Here, look.”
She spun the laptop around again and jabbed her finger at the screen. It was filled with an image of me dancing with Declan. We were in profile, with the background of glittery lights hazy behind us. I was gazing up at him with a coquettishly tilted head and mischievous close-mouthed smile, like I was trying to hold back a full grin. But Declan… the way he was looking at me took my breath away. He was locked onto me like there was no oneelse in the room but the two of us. He looked enchanted by me and absolutely lost in my eyes.
“Um…” I said, then trailed off, unable to look away from what was so obvious on the screen in front of me.
“Yeah,umis right!” Fiona huffed. “And there’s more.” She dragged the laptop back and smacked the arrow key quickly. “Look.”
I scrolled to a series of us dancing and felt a little embarrassed at how…sexywe looked. In one, I was pressed up against Declan, gazing up at him like I wanted to devour him. Another shot from behind me showed Declan’s big hands on me, one resting on my shoulder and the other dangerously close to my ass. The way we were captured made it hard to tell if we were kissing or talking. Anyone looking at the photos would assume we were a couple.
At that point, we weren’t. And now we weren’t once again.
I bit the inside of my lip to keep from welling up. No matter how I tried to ignore it, I missed him.
“Hey,” Fiona said, grasping my shoulder. “Talk. You always force me to do it when I don’t want to. Now it’s your turn.”
“What’s left to say?” It exploded out of me more angrily than I’d intended. I took a breath. “Declan and I had a good thing for a little while, then he made a choice, afewchoices, and none of them were me.”
Admitting it out loud made me feel seasick.
“What choices?” Zoe asked. She didn’t know the details of the break up—I hadn’t wanted to talk about it and it wasn’t as if she hung around at the cattlemen’s meetings.
“His job, and… Becca.” I glanced at Zoe and saw the telltale grimace when I said Becca’s name. “It’s stupid because my rational side knows that he needed to work hard to win over Dr. Wilcox so she’d sell him her practice, but sometimes it felt like it wasallhe cared about. Even more than me. And when he told Becca about Sunshine… well, that made it clear to me that he wasn’t on my side.”
“Wait. Are you talking about the same Becca we ran into at the supply store?” my sister asked and I nodded. “Whoa, she was a real bitch.”
“Shan…” Zoe began tentatively, interrupting Fiona’s fuming. “I understand why you’d be upset about what happened with Becca, but did you ever stop to think that maybe it was a verbal fumble? We both know he would never purposely set out to hurt you and we all know that Becca talks a good story. Maybe it was just a slip-up? A bad one, definitely, but it wasn’t an act of sabotage or anything.”
“Did he apologize?” Fiona asked.
I nodded. “A few times.”
“See?” Zoe said. “And as for him choosing work over you, have you ever considered that maybe it wasn’toveryou, it wasforyou?”
I frowned. “How?”
