Never Sweeter(5)

“Wait, what?” he said. “Now hold on a second, that is not what happened at all.”

“Please tell me you’re not going to try gaslighting me over a fucking head injury. You grabbed me and then let go right when you knew I would slam into the ground.”

“Jesus Christ, Letty I don’t even know what gaslight means. I’ve never known what it means. You say these things and I’ve no fucking clue what you’re talking about.”

Tate stopped there and took a breath in a way that seemed oddly familiar. Then she realized: it was like her glancing up at the ceiling to stop the tears, even though he didn’t appear tearful at all. She wasn’t sure Tate could cry, if she was being honest. So what was this? What exactly did he need to contain?

Anger, she thoughtand it was true, his voice was softer when he started talking again.

But there was something else there, too. A kind of desperation that made her feel odd.

“And that is fine. That is really cool that you’re super smart and know about this shit,” Tate said. “Shit that I probably did do once without, like, being aware of it. But I swear to god I’m not doing it here. I swear to you that I just wanted to stop you falling, and then you looked scared as fuck and like you wanted to kill me and so I just backed off. I just backed off, that’s all.”

He drew a line under his words with his hands, firm and sure, and when he did that odd feeling tripled. It made her want to slide down the double doors and onto the floor, for reasons she couldn’t grasp. It had to be her not-that-serious-injury, but it didn’t feel like it. It felt like something else. Like she believed him.

And she couldn’t allow that.

“Then keep doing it. Back all the way off until we can barely see each other. You understand me, Tate? If you really are concerned, just leave me alone.”





Chapter 3


It took a full three days to accept that Tate had listened. Three days of peering around corners before going in that direction. Three days of anxious messages from her dad, asking her ridiculous things like did she want him to call the police? Three days of wondering if she should call the police, even though there was nothing to tell them. He wasn’t doing any of the old bullshit he used to door at least none that warranted her dad getting as upset as he had the last time. She could almost see the four worry lines across his forehead in every text; the way he’d seemed to age overnight.

She didn’t want him to get any older.

So she messaged back that everything was fine, and only afterward realized that it was. Tate was just never anywhere, not even in places he was supposed to be. She braced herself for Harrison’s next class, but had no need to. When she dared to look in that direction, someone else sat in his seat. And a cursory glance around told her that he had not simply chosen another one. There were no six-foot-five-inch guys in the lecture hall, busy being too massive for their chairs.

If anything, everyone else was more of a problem. Halfway through a PowerPoint presentation on gender bias in modern cinema, she got that creeping, self-conscious feeling. The one that used to come over her whenever she studied too hard in front of Tate in some class he didn’t care for. Usually it meant that he was watching her with that bright spark of amusement in the corners of his eyes, just waiting to make trouble.

But when she scanned the lecture hallwith her head still down to appear as inconspicuous as possiblethere were no signs of him. He hadn’t slipped in as her attention waned.

It was other people. A girl seven rows down was looking directly at her with the oddest expression on her face. It seemed like curiosity, but it was lacking something. Some vital component that made it make senseand after a second she realized what it was. The girl looked happy, not angry or cruel or annoyed. Her eyes were bright, but not with evil intent. And then just to cap it off, she smiled.

She smiled and waved.

What the hell was a complete stranger doing smiling and waving? She checked behind herself to see if the girl was communicating to someone else, but the only thing back there was a wall and a window, several feet above her head. It was such a certain thing she simply had to wave back, in case she was just knee-jerk rejecting a potential friend. A good friend, the kind she’d hoped to find here.

And then there was the other girl. The even more popular and pretty one, who was bizarrely being about a hundred times less subtle than the first. This girl had turned all the way around in her chair, and was actually whispering, “Hey,” over and over at her. It was so bad that her friendwho had quite possibly the most amazing haircut Letty had ever seen, like a stripe of animal fur down the center of her headwas tugging at her arm and kind of telling her to knock it off.