“But you just said—you’re confusing me, Ben.”
“Me,” I say. “We’re talking about me now. Do you want me to talk?”
A little line appears between her eyes. “Do you have something you want to get off your chest?”
It’s a nearly verbatim replay of our earlier conversation, except with the roles reversed, and suddenly I lose patience with all our stupid word games and how we’re tiptoeing around each other.
“Sit down,” I say.
“You’re being weird,” she says.
She moves toward the couch anyway, but then I change my mind about her sitting, and my hand snakes out, grabbing her arm and pulling her around so we’re face-to-face.
We’re both breathing harder than the situation calls for. But maybe that’s not true, because the bomb I’m about to drop on her is a big one.
“Parker, I—”
“Don’t go to Seattle,” she blurts, interrupting me.
“I—what?”
She moves closer, her eyes full of panic. “Don’t go to Seattle.”
I shake my head. “I already turned in the applications—”
“So? You can do more applications here. To Portland schools.”
This so isn’t what I want to be talking about right now, but I suppose it’s as good a segue to what I have to say to her as any, so I go with it. “I can’t stay here, Parker.”
“You have to,” she says, her voice breaking. She reaches out her hands toward my chest then yanks them back so they’re cradled against her own chest. “You can’t leave me.”
My heart breaks, even amid my confusion. “Parks—”
“Or I’ll go with you!” she says. “I mean, I’ll have to come back to Portland, like, all the time because of my mom, but I could live with you in Seattle some of the time, and—”
Something is wrong. She isn’t acting right.
I grab her hands, holding them still. “Parker. Sweetie. What’s wrong? Is it your mom? Has she taken a turn for the worse?”
Her eyes are overflowing with tears. “No. She’s the same. Prognosis is the same.” She licks tears off her lips, and my heart breaks all over again.
What is going on here?
I take a deep breath. “Did Lance—”
“We broke up.” She’s talking faster now.
My first reaction is relief. Deep, soul-wrenching relief. For me.
Followed quickly with pain for her. I hate that I have to watch her go through this again. No wonder she’s so worked up. She just got dumped.
And yet none of this makes sense. Why would he go from carrying a ring around to breaking up with her in twenty-four hours?
“Did he say why?” I ask.
“Why what?”
“Why he broke up with you?” I say, keeping my voice as gentle as possible.