Chapter Fourteen

The earlier heat has been tamed by the darkness and a slight breeze, the parking lot all balmy and sweet with the kind of midsummer warmth that borders on magic. I close my eyes and breathe it in, a little lighter on my feet than I thought I'd be, enough that I almost lose my balance and end up grazing Levi's arm with my own.

I straighten up to play it off but can't quite wipe the stupid grin off my face, the aftermath of the kiss still humming in my lips. I can't remember the last time I felt this electric, buzzing with so much energy it feels like I am outside the edges of myself, soaking in everyone else's happiness right along with mine.

"Safe to say we can never show our faces at a single trivia night on the Eastern Seaboard again," says Levi.

"Yeah." This time I lean into him on purpose, and he seamlessly reaches his hand out and puts it in mine.

That potential is still thrumming between us, unspoken under the words we're actually saying, but so loud that I'm barely registering anything else. Levi's eyes catch mine again, and as he leans in, I feel a thrill that starts in my stomach and slides all the way up, arching in my back in anticipation of another kiss.

But instead he says quietly, "What if I didn't go back to New York?"

The thrill goes flat in me before the words can settle. I blink up at him.

"You mean… what if you stayed in Benson Beach?" I ask.

Earlier I'd been worried that Levi was taking this situation with Kelly too lightly, that at any moment the reality of it was going to come crashing down. Over the course of the night, of the reminiscing and the catching up and the kiss, I forgot to worry about it. Only now it feels like reality is settling in the wrong place. Somewhere in me, instead of in him.

I stop at the edge of the parking lot, searching his face. "That's a really big decision to make, Levi."

"I know," he says, tugging lightly on my arm. "That's why I want to know what you think about it."

"I…" Have no way of answering that without feeling like the most selfish person in the world. I glance down at the pavement, and then back up at him, and by then, I can see my uncertainty leaking right into him. "I think you might be getting ahead of yourself. Have you really thought through what that would mean?"

Levi presses his lips together, shifting his weight between his feet. "Do you not want me to be here?"

"Of course I do," I say quickly. "I just…" I carefully pull my hand out from his, and I don't miss the quick streak of hurt across his face. "You've lived in New York for a decade. We've been pretending to date for two weeks now so you could win back someone else. Someone you only decided to move on from a few hours ago. You've barely had any time to process it."

Levi shakes his head. "I feel like I've had too much time to process it. Years of it." He's more earnest than I've seen him in ages, but it's grounded in resolve. "I'm not nearly as happy there as I am right here, right now."

Everything about this is so tempting. I could fall into these words like warm sheets and tuck myself into them. Wrap myself up so tight that I can't see the world beyond them. But somebody has to, and I'm not sure if Levi is thinking straight.

"Exactly. You're happy right now, Levi," I say as patiently as I can. "You've come out of years of living this life you didn't plan to lead and you're just coming up for air."

He isn't shaking his head anymore. Just staring at me, the blue of his eyes striking in the dark, the openness of them so stirring that I forget where we are.

"I'm happy with you ," he finally says. "I thought… I thought maybe you felt the same way."

The words reach in too deep and too fast, and something in me gives way. Something I've held around my heart for so many years that I feel raw, letting it fall at our feet. The last protective barrier between me and Levi—the truth.

"Of course I do. I always have. And that's just it, Levi—I can't risk it again." My throat is so tight that it's an effort to say it, even as it's tumbling out of me, even though the words have been waiting on the tip of my tongue, the back of my teeth, for years. "You cut yourself out of my life in high school over a crush. If you start telling me you're here for good, and you wake up in a few days or a week or whenever from now, and you change your mind? It's going to break me all over again."

I'm almost out of breath when I finish. The confession empties me out, makes me feel like a stray balloon that's going to go up and up and up if one of us doesn't reach out and grab it, and fast.

But Levi's just staring at me, stunned, every other emotion knocked right out of his face. "Wait—June, what do you mean about high school?"

I take a step away from him, coming back to myself. "Oh, come on, Levi. Everyone knew," I say, my skin flaring hot from my ears to my chest. "Hell, they still do. All everyone in town says about us is that it's ‘about time.'"

"But you didn't like me," Levi says slowly. "You said so yourself. Loudly. To my face."

"If I recall, you said it first," I remind him.

The memory doesn't slam into me, because it's always been there. Like it lives somewhere deep under my skin, where it's been burrowing since the day it happened.

Of all clichés, it was just after prom. We'd gone as a group, Annie, Levi, me, and Mateo. Annie had peeled off pretty quickly to dance with some brooding guy in her English class. Mateo left early to meet up with Dylan for a sci-fi movie they'd wanted to see in theaters. And Levi and I, left to our own devices, spent the entire night dancing while our classmates snickered and pulled faces over our shoulders and we pretended not to notice.

It was a perfect night. Like Levi was a chorus to a song I'd known the words to my whole life, and we'd just reached the bridge. The melody was shifting, swelling, turning into something new.

I'd wanted to tell him how I felt since the start of my junior year, when suddenly Levi and I were holding each other's gazes a little too long, keeping each other a little too close. And standing there with my cheek pressed to his shoulder, in my lavender dress with my hair all carefully styled in the intricate, swirling updo Levi's mom had swooped it into just hours before, I almost did. But I knew Levi was going to Stanford with Annie. So I decided if our feelings really were mutual, I'd wait for him to say something. He was the one leaving, after all. I didn't want to feel like I was tying him down.

When he dropped me off at home that night, he kissed me on the cheek, and asked if I wanted to meet up the next day and go for a hike in the woods, just him and me. I was up for hours after that, so giddy that it felt like my heart was going to burst in my chest, that I woke up still wearing my dress with my heels kicked onto the floor.

That morning I was still daydreamy and dopey, walking down to the beach to run some of it out of my system, when I heard people arguing under the boardwalk. Levi and Annie.

I was just going to ignore it and start my run. Annie squabbled all the time. Whatever it was about, it would be forgotten by the time they knocked their sandy shoes off on the front porch and came in for breakfast.

But then I heard Annie saying my name, and when I shifted myself out of the way of the wind, I could hear her words, plain and distinct: "You're only doing this because of your big, stupid crush on June."

"What crush?"

Levi's question froze me in place like a rabbit listening for footfalls, but Annie's voice was what made me stay. It was clear she was crying.

"Oh, come off it, Levi. You two have been all over each other for months. You're flirting up enough of a storm that even your damn coaches think you're dating."

"She just flirts with me to be funny. You know how June is. It's all just a joke to her," said Levi, quick and placating. "She knows I don't like her like that."

The words felt like a clean slice right through my ribs, so sharp and so fast that I couldn't even feel the pain of them. Just the white-hot humiliation, the shock of disbelief. It felt worse than a rejection. It felt like a betrayal, or maybe something worse. Either he was lying to Annie and throwing me under the bus, or we'd so fundamentally misunderstood each other for the past year that it made every moment between us feel cheap.

I didn't hide. I marched under the boardwalk and confronted them both right on the spot. It was like I didn't have a choice—my body was moving before I could think, and then there they were, Annie red in the face and Levi looking more stricken at the sight of me than he would at the boardwalk collapsing.

Levi's voice pulls me out of the memory, the calm in it jarring me, bringing me back to the balmy night. "Did Annie ever tell you why we were fighting?"

I drop his gaze. "No."

He steps off the curb where we've been standing and I follow, settling in closer to the exterior of the bar, where fewer people can see us.

Levi worries his lip with a guilt that I know too well—a guilt for something that happened back then that only feels magnified now. The same way anything involving Annie does, now that she's gone.

"That morning I told Annie I was going to New York. I blindsided her. She was furious, and I still don't blame her. We'd been talking about going out to the West Coast together for years, and then I was dropping this bomb on her." He runs a hand through his hair, and I can tell it takes a lot of effort to meet my eye as he says, "She said—she said I was only doing it because of you."

"Why would she think that?" I ask, not bothering to hide the bitterness in my voice.

"Because I was." Levi says it so plainly, so honestly, that it feels like that same slice in my ribs is opening again. Like I could look down right now and stare into my own beating heart. "Because I hadn't even left yet, and I already missed you so badly I couldn't stand it."

I shake my head. "That day on the beach. You said…"

Levi's voice is so steady that suddenly I'm the one who's gone wobbly, like we're just taking turns trying to steer this conversation before it can spin out from under us.

"I know what I said. And I was horrified you heard it. The truth is, I was just saying whatever I could to calm Annie down. I didn't want to fight, so I just—was a coward about it," he admits. "As soon as I realized you heard, I was going to take it back. But then you turned around and said you didn't like me, either."

Those words were a sharp line in the sand—a divider between the end of childhood and the start of something else. Levi avoided me the rest of that summer. Left for New York early to get his bearings and didn't do anything more than send short texts in response to mine for two solid years. When I finished up my freshman year of college and I realized he was still in touch with Annie and not with me, I gave up on him altogether.

He tried to come back, though. It's easy for me to push that aside, but he did. Around the time I graduated and took off with Griffin for the trip that turned into a few dozen more, he started texting every month or so. Called on my birthdays. Asked if I was ever coming into the city. But by then I was so angry with him that I wouldn't budge. I told myself it was the only choice I had, the only way to protect myself from the hurt—but now that I'm looking into Levi's eyes, I understand that it wasn't just that. I was looking to punish him. I wanted him to feel just as awful as I did, so I seized on my own silence like a weapon.

"It was all just a fluke, then," says Levi. "A misunderstanding."

But I shake my head. It wasn't a misunderstanding. Maybe it was in the heat of that moment, but the rest of it was on us. I was too stubborn, too proud to try to fix anything. And Levi—I think he was just scared. He'd always avoided any kind of conflict, always felt everything so deeply, so viscerally when we were kids. All I can think is that these plans he made, the molds he made himself fit into, were an easy way to push those feelings out.

An easy way to push me out. And once I was out, I was determined to stay gone.

"We had so much time to fix it," I murmur, more to myself than to him. It's almost worse, knowing his side of this story. Understanding we didn't waste all this time because of a mistake. We wasted all this time because of who we are as people. Who we are in our bones.

"We still have time," says Levi. "And we've been starting to fix it, haven't we?"

There's a smile tugging at my lips, but it's aching and sad. "We've been playing pretend."

"If I'm being honest, June, I wasn't playing at anything." Levi's throat bobs. "Those moments that made us go viral? Not one of them was staged. Maybe Sana told us to be there. But every single one of them was just us."

He's right. But it doesn't change the fact that we had to pretend to care about each other to even let ourselves care. This entire time, we've had a safety net under us. If it ever felt like we were coming too close or going too far, we always had the option of saying it was for the sake of our pact. What we're saying now is so outside of that safety net that if we stumble, we're going to freefall.

"I look at those pictures and I almost don't recognize myself," says Levi. "I haven't felt this happy in a long time."

"I'm glad for that. I really am. But I'm worried," I admit. "That this is all just—a vacation to you. That this is all happening really, really fast."

I stand by what I said—that I don't think anyone should have to be settled to be loved. But I know Levi. This isn't just his life in flux, the way it's been since Kelly cheated on him. This is Levi making a choice that seems bolder than any he's made in years. It feels reckless. It feels unlike him. And if I'm going to have Levi, I want Levi —not some temporary version of him I might lose when he comes to his senses. Not one that might be as easy to lose as he was all those years ago, when we let our pride and our fear get in the way.

"How about this, then." Levi takes a step closer to me, and it feels like it isn't just bridging the gap between us right now, but the careful, quiet one we've kept between us since he got back. "Let's take the whole… moving back thing off the table. We take all of it off the table, even," he says. "We just take it one step at a time. You and me."

I stay rooted in place, but my head tilts up to his like there's something magnetic in it, something that couldn't pull my eyes off his if I tried. "We don't even know what that looks like anymore," I say, still cautious.

"If that means we're friends, that means we're friends. But June…" He reaches out and holds the tips of my fingers with his hand, light and searching. "What I felt for you then? What I feel for you now? It never went away."

My fingers curl around his on instinct, pulling both of his hands into mine, pulling him closer to me.

"Me neither," I say quietly.

His hands squeeze mine, the question in them before he asks it. "What do you want to do?"

The word want snags in my chest like a hook and pulls. I want to go back and undo the past—not that day under the boardwalk, but all the days that came after it. I want to know what the future holds before I take too many steps into it. I want to rehash everything that's ever happened, I want to scorch the earth and start new, I want to be able to trust this wholly and completely without all the what if s and what about s still rattling in my head.

But there is one thing I want that's louder than all the others, crackling between us. One thing I want that I know I can have. One thing I've wanted for so long that it feels like it's grown roots in the marrow of my bones.

I lean in, my hips slowly closing the distance between us. "You mean right now?" I ask.

Levi's fingers loosen from my hands and settle so gently on my waist that, if it weren't for the warmth spreading out from under my ribs, they'd feel like an extension of me. Like the dip above my hips was meant for the shape of his hands. "Yeah," he says, his voice low, his eyes hungry and half-lidded in the shadow of the bar. "Right now."

"This," I tell him, and then I catch his lips with mine and sink into the heat of it, the sweet shock of it, the world slipping out from under me so fast that it feels like we're falling into a brand-new one, and it's just Levi and June all the way down.