“You knew we weren’t really broken up! You knew it wasn’t real!”
Miserably, he said, “How was I supposed to know that?”
“If I knew it, you should have known it!”
He swallowed, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “Lacie kept following me around all week. She wouldn’t leave me alone. I swear to you, I didn’t want to hook up with her. It just happened.” His voice trailed off.
I felt so dirty inside hearing him say that. Just disgusted.
I didn’t want to think about the two of them, didn’t want to picture it. “Be quiet,” I said. “I don’t want to hear it.”
“It was a mistake.”
“A mistake? You call that a mistake? A mistake is when you left my shower shoes in the shower and they got all mildewy and I had to throw them out. That’s a mistake, you jerk.” I burst into tears.
He didn’t say anything. He just sat there and took it, his head hanging down.
“I don’t even know who you are anymore.” My stomach lurched. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
Jeremiah got me the wastebasket by his bed and I threw up, heaving and crying. He tried to rub my back, but I jerked away from him. “Don’t touch me,” I mumbled, wiping my mouth with the back of my arm.
It didn’t make sense. None of it. This wasn’t the Jeremiah I knew. My Jeremiah would never hurt me like this. He would never so much as look at another girl. My Jeremiah was true and strong and steady. I didn’t know who this person was.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”
Jeremiah was crying now too. Good, I thought. Hurt like you’ve hurt me.
“I want to be totally honest with you, Belly. I don’t want any more secrets.” He really broke down then, crying hard.
I went totally still.
“We had sex.”
Before I knew it, my hand was striking his face. I slapped him as hard as I could. I wasn’t even thinking, I was just doing. My hand left a splotchy red imprint on his right cheek.
We stared at each other. I couldn’t believe I had hit him, and neither could he. The shock was just beginning to register on his face, and I probably had the same look on mine. I had never hit anyone before.
Rubbing his cheek, he said, “I’m so sorry.”
I cried harder. I had pictured them hooking up, making out, I hadn’t even considered sex. I was so stupid.
He said, “It didn’t mean anything. I swear to you, it didn’t.”
He tried to touch my arm, and I flinched. Wiping my cheeks, I said, “Maybe to you sex doesn’t mean anything.
But it means something to me, and you knew that. You’ve ruined everything. I’ll never trust you again.”
He tried to pull me toward him, but I pushed him away. Desperately, he said, “I’m telling you, the thing with Lacie didn’t mean anything.”
“It means something to me. And it obviously meant something to her.”
“I’m not in love with her!” he cried out. “I’m in love with you!”
Jeremiah crawled over to where I was. He put his arms around my knees. “Don’t leave,” he begged. “Please don’t leave.”
I tried to shake him off, but he was strong. He clung to me like I was a raft and he was at sea.
“I love you so much,” he said, his whole body shaking.
“It’s always been you, Belly.”
I wanted to keep screaming and crying and somehow find a way out of this. But I didn’t see a way. Looking down at him, I felt like I was made of stone. He had never disappointed me before. For him to do it now made it that much harder, because I hadn’t seen it coming. It was hard to believe that just a few short hours ago he’d carried me across campus on his back and I’d loved him more than ever.
“We can’t get it back,” I said, and I said it to hurt him.
“What we were, it’s gone. We lost it tonight.”
Desperately, he said, “Yes, we can. I know we can.”
I shook my head. The tears had started again, but I didn’t want to cry anymore, especially not in front of him. Or with him. I didn’t want to feel sad. I didn’t want to feel anything. I wiped my face again and said, “I’m leaving.”
He rose to his feet unsteadily. “Wait!”
I pushed past him and grabbed my bag from his bed.
Then I was out the door, running down the stairs and outside. I ran all the way to the bus stop, my bag banging against my shoulder, my heels clacking against the pave-ment. I almost tripped and fell, but I made it. I caught the bus just as the last person was getting on, and we drove off. I didn’t look back to see if Jeremiah had followed me.
My roommate, Jillian, had gone home for the summer earlier that day, so at least I had the room to myself and could cry alone. Jeremiah kept calling and texting, so I turned my phone off. But before I went to bed, I turned it back on again so I could see what he wrote me.
I’m so ashamed of myself.
Please talk to me.
I love you and I always will.
I cried harder.
Chapter Five
When we broke up in April, it really did come out of nowhere. Yes, we’d had little fights here and there, but you could hardly even call them fights.
Like, there was this time Shay was having a party at her godmother’s country house. She invited a ton of people, and she said I could bring Jeremiah, too. We were gonna get dressed up and dance outside all night long. We’d all just crash there for the weekend, Shay said—it would be a blast. I was just happy to be included. I told Jeremiah about it, and he said he had an intramural soccer game but I should go anyway. I said, “Can’t you just miss it? It’s not like it’s a real game.” It was a bitchy thing to say, but I said it, and I meant it.
That was our first fight. Not a real fight, not like yelling or anything, but he was mad and so was I.
We always hung out with his friends. In a way it made sense. He already had them, and I was still forming mine.
It took time to get close to people, and with me at his frat house all the time, the girls on my hall were bonding without me.
And there were other things, too, that annoyed me.
Things I’d never known about Jeremiah, things I couldn’t have known from only seeing him in the summer at the beach house. Like how obnoxious he was when he smoked weed with his suitemates and they ate pineapple-and-ham pizza and listened to “Gangsta’s Paradise” by Coolio and they would laugh for, like, an hour.