Love & Gelato(63)

“Lina?” Ren looked up from the desk. He had a clipboard in front of him. “Are you okay?”

I pulled the door open and burst out onto the sidewalk, Ren chasing after me. I turned and ran up the street, my legs heavy as sandbags. Her mind was weak.

Finally Ren caught up to me, grabbing my arm.

“Lina, what happened? What happened in there?”

A wave of nausea washed over me and I ran over to the edge of the street and started dry heaving. Finally the feeling passed and I sank to the ground, the pavement hard under my knees.

Ren was kneeling next to me. “Lina, what just happened?”

I turned and pressed my face into his chest and suddenly I wasn’t just crying. I was sobbing. Like splitting-at-the-seams, exploding-into-a-million-pieces, falling-apart crying. The weight of the last ten months was dumping down on me, and I couldn’t do a thing about it.

I cried and cried and cried. Hot, noisy tears that didn’t care who was watching. The kind of crying I’d never done in front of anyone.

“Lina, it’s okay,” Ren said over and over, his arms wrapped around me. “It’s going to be okay.”

But no, it wasn’t. And it never would be. My mom was gone. And I missed her so much I sometimes wondered how I was breathing. Howard wasn’t my father. And Matteo . . . I don’t know how long I cried for, but finally I felt my feet reach the bottom, my last few sobs coming out in shudders.

I opened my eyes. We were both still kneeling on the ground, and I was smooshed into Ren, my face buried in his neck, his skin hot and sticky. I pulled back. Ren’s shirt had a giant soggy puddle on it, and he looked mortified.

This was so much more than he’d bargained for.

“I’m sorry,” I said hoarsely.

“What just happened?”

I wiped my face, then pulled him up to standing. “He said my mom made it all up. She was obsessed with him and she wrote a fake journal to get him in trouble with the school.”

“Che bastardo. That’s not even that good of a story.” He looked at me closer. “Wait. You didn’t believe him, did you?”

I hesitated for a moment, then shook my head hard, my hair sticking to my wet cheeks. “No. At first it scared me. But that wasn’t her. She never would have hurt someone she loved.”

He exhaled. “You scared me for a minute.”

“I just can’t believe that she loved him. He was horrible. And Howard is so . . .” I looked up.

Ren’s face was like six inches away from mine, and suddenly we locked eyes and I wasn’t thinking about Matteo and Howard anymore.





Chapter 21




IT WASN’T A LITTLE KISS. Not like your first peck or like the time you made out with your junior high boyfriend behind the movie theater. It was throw-your-arms-around-his-neck, bury-your-fingers-in-his-hair, why-haven’t-we-done-this-before kissing straight through all the salt on my face. Ren circled his hands around my waist and for five seconds everything was perfect, and then—

He pushed me off him.

Pushed.

Me.

Off.

Him.

I wanted the sidewalk to swallow me up.

He wouldn’t look at me.

Seriously, why hadn’t it swallowed me up yet?

“Ren . . . I don’t know what just happened.” He’d been kissing me back, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he?

He was staring at the ground. “No, no. It’s okay. I just don’t think that the timing’s the best, you know?”

TIMING. My face went up in flames. Not only had he just had to peel me off of him, but he was being nice about it. Lina, fix this. Words started pouring out of my mouth.

“You’re right. You’re totally right. I think I just got carried away after what happened in there—it was really emotional, and I think I just redirected and . . .” I squeezed my eyes shut. “We’re just friends. I know that. And I’ve never, ever, ever thought of you as anything more.”

Does it count as a lie if you’re denying something you’ve only fully admitted to yourself for about a minute? Also: One too many “evers” there. But I was going for believable.

Ren’s gaze shot up, meeting mine with literally the most unreadable expression on the planet. And then he was gone again. “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”



Why, why, why did I do that? I slumped against my door of the taxi. Ren was sitting as far away from me as was physically possible, and he was staring out the window like he was trying to memorize the streets or something.

Couldn’t I have a repeat? Go back twenty minutes to when I hadn’t already lost my head and kissed my best friend who had a girlfriend and clearly didn’t want me? Back before I’d noticed how much I loved his shaggy hair and sense of humor or the fact that even though I’d known him for less than a week I somehow felt comfortable sharing all my crazy history with him?

Oh my gosh. I was so in love it hurt.

I pressed my fingers into my chest. You’ve known him like five days. There’s no way you can be in love with him. Totally rational.

Totally not true.

Of course I was in love with Ren. He was exactly himself, and I was exactly myself when I was with him. And all of that would be perfect if he felt even close to the same. But he didn’t. I glanced over at him, and a flash of pain moved through me. Was he even going to talk to me again?