“Hey,” he’d said when he finally called the night before, around eleven. “It’s me.”
“Hi.”
The awkwardness was like thin air, making it hard to breathe or think.
“I guess,” he said after a long pause, “that we need to talk.”
“Yeah. I guess so.” I swallowed, wondering if he could tell I’d been crying. I honestly, still, could not believe that any of this was happening. A lot of people lied and cheated, I knew that. But Luke was one of the good ones. Then again, I’d also been sure he was mine. “Did you . . . you called her?”
“Emaline,” he said, sounding sad.
“Just tell me.”
Another pause. Too long, I knew, to be followed by anything I wanted to hear. “Yes. I called her.”
“Why?” I asked.
In the quiet that followed I thought, for some reason, of the first days we’d been dating, way back in ninth grade. How just seeing him coming towards me in the crowded hallway before first period made me nervous and insanely happy all at once. My throat got tight, and I cleared it. I was all too aware that he still hadn’t answered me.
“I think we need to talk face to face,” he said. “Not like this.”
I bit my lip. “All right. When?”
“Before work tomorrow? Last Chance? Like, at eight?”
“Okay.”
Too much silence, I thought, as we endured another pause. Luke and I were a lot of things, but quiet had never been one of them. Now, I’d had nothing but quiet in the hours since, most of which I spent shuffling the events of the last two days as I knew them, trying to make them add up to something else. But all I could see, again and again, was that girl—dropping his wiper back down over her note. Thwack.
Now, I pulled my coffee towards me and took a sip. I was just putting it back on the table when the bells over the front door jangled and Luke came in.
He glanced around, his expression businesslike. Then he saw me, and something softened in his features, triggering the same reaction in my own. Oh my God, I thought. Please, no. No. But then he was sliding in across from me, and it was already happening.
“I’m sorry,” he said, immediately. The words came out rushed, like he’d been holding them in with his breath. “I’m so sorry, Emaline.”
I swallowed, hard, as the waitress returned with the coffeepot. Luke turned over his cup, she filled it, and then, thankfully, moved on. “I don’t even know what you’re apologizing for yet.”
He ran a hand over his hair, then looked outside at the boardwalk, the ocean beyond it. It was a cloudy day, the sky gray and flat bordering the horizon. I waited for him to speak again. He didn’t.
“Okay,” I said finally. “You were pissed about me not returning your text because I was with Theo. So you called her. I get it. I’m not happy, and clearly it’s a sign of a bigger issue. But—”
“It was before that.”
I took me a minute to actually hear this. Like the letters or sounds were scrambled and had to rearrange themselves. “What?”
He shifted his gaze slowly away from the window, then found my face. “I called her before I saw you with him.”
“You—” I stopped, realizing I was sputtering. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” he replied.
“That’s not an acceptable answer,” I told him, like this was a game show and he’d phrased it incorrectly. “Try again.”
I watched him exhale, his chest falling. “You know we haven’t been hanging out so much lately. Things have been . . . weird. Kind of off, you know. And then she left that note . . .”
“And you decided to cheat on me,” I finished for him.
“It wasn’t like that.” He reached up, pinching at the skin between his closed eyes. “Look, I’m not sure why I called. I just did. And she said she was going out that night with her friends, and I should meet them. I wasn’t going to do it. At least, I don’t think I was.”
I held my breath, scared that even the smallest sound might cause him to say what I so did not want to hear.
“But then,” he went on, dropping his hand, “I did see you, after you’d blown off my text. I was pissed off. So I went.”
“You met her,” I said, clarifying. He nodded, not looking at me. “Did you sleep with her?”
“No!” he said, sounding surprised. “God, Emaline. Do you really think I’d do that?”
“I don’t know what to think about you anymore!” A woman at another booth turned, slightly, to glance at us. I lowered my voice. “Seriously. How could you do this?”
“I’m not the only one who’s been acting questionably here. You were hanging out with another guy, remember?”
“That was work related.”
“Oh, right,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Because you’re always driving around after dark with some dude on official company business.”
“I didn’t do anything with Theo but drive him around,” I shot back. “We weren’t at some club together. Where did you go, anyway? Tallyho?”
I’d been joking, not that any of this was funny. When he stared back at me, though, flushing slightly, all I wanted to do was cry.
“Oh my God,” I said. “Luke. Really?”
And it was then, of course, that the waitress appeared at the end of the table, her pad in hand. “Okay. Ready to order?”