“You’re going down, Galloway,” I threatened teasingly, picking up the cards to shuffle them.
Three games later, I had only won one of them, but I didn’t care because we were laughing and joking together like we were still sixteen.
“I’ve missed this, you know,” I said, picking up my cards. The air was starting to cool, and the shadows grew longer. I had no idea how long we’d been out there. Hours most likely. But I was in no rush to leave and get back to the real world. Because in that world, Meg would leave me eventually.
But here, at Old Grourer’s swimming hole, we were just where we needed to be.
Meg glanced up at me, her eyes were warm, if not a little sad. “Me too, Adam.” She let out a sigh. “I tried really hard not to miss this, but it’s always felt as if there was a giant hole, right here.” She pressed her finger to the center of her chest. Right over her heart.
I put down a run of clubs but refrained from rubbing it in. “You hated me that much, huh.” I didn’t pose it as a question. It was more of a rhetorical question. I already knew the answer.
Meg gave me one anyway.
“Yes, Adam, I hated you. So much. Mostly because I cared about you so damn much.” She ran her fingers over her cards before discarding one. “I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to get over that.”
I sucked in a breath before asking my next question. “And have you? Gotten over it?”
She lifted those green, green eyes, and I felt like I was hanging on the edge of a cliff waiting for her to drop me over.
“You know I planned to tell you that I loved you that night. At Homecoming.” She looked away. “I stupidly thought you felt the same way. Especially after that day here. In the water.” Her expression hardened slightly. “I thought you were going to kiss me.” She laughed without humor. “But you’d already been seeing Chelsea for what, two weeks by then? I was such a goddamn idiot.”
I swallowed thickly. “Yeah, I guess I had been.”
Meg closed her eyes, shaking her head. “I felt like such a mug. It wasn’t just about you being with someone else—though that was bad enough—it was that you were with her. You knew how much I hated her. You broke my heart, Adam. And you used her to do it.”
I put my cards down and reached out to take her hand. I was relieved when she didn’t pull away. “I was going to kiss you that day, Meg. You weren’t, nor have you ever been a mug.” She wouldn’t look at me. God, I wanted her to look at me. “I had been in love with you for years. That kiss in your bedroom when we were thirteen wasn’t an accident. I had been planning it for months.”
Meg’s lips quirked slightly as she tried to bite off a smile. “You’d think after months of planning you would have executed it better.”
I took her chin between my fingers and turned her face towards me. Her eyes were bright as though she were trying not to cry. “I thought of nothing but your face for years. You were my whole world. Don’t you get that?”The confession felt good. I had been waiting to tell her this for far too long.
“Then why, Adam? Why Chelsea?”
This was where we’d always end up. Back here. At Chelsea.
“Because she was everything you weren’t,” I admitted, hating how harsh the truth sounded.
Meg flinched. “Ouch, Ducate. That hurt.”
I lifted her hand to my mouth, kissing the knuckles. “I had given up on you loving me back, Meg, but you were tormenting me. You were this gorgeous, fierce, crazy smart girl that I needed to be with, but I thought it was a dead-end road.”
“But it wasn’t, Adam. I wanted you too,” Meg breathed, looking pained.
I kissed her hand again, needing to feel her. Scared she’d disappear. “I was a moronic seventeen-year-old boy who didn’t take being friend-zoned very well. And then I went to Lance Ridgeway’s party. You decided not to go because you and Skylar wanted to see that movie with the French subtitles. You were always doing other things. Hanging out with Skylar. Going shopping with Whitney. It felt as if you were pulling away slowly. I knew you were counting down the days until you left Southport. I felt like you were counting down the days until you left me.”
Meg frowned. “That’s ridiculous. I had a life, Adam. I had other friends. And I planned to go to school, but that didn’t mean I’d leave you behind.”
I lifted my hands in a gesture of acquiescence. “I know that now through the lens of a very mature twenty-something man.” Meg chuckled, appreciating the attempt at levity. “But I was a teenager. And teenagers aren’t known for their clear thought processes.”