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“Come on,” I said, grabbing Max’s arm roughly. “Let’s go say hi.”

? ? ?

“CAT, HEY,” AUDREY said, dropping the lock of hair and beaming at me like she hadn’t just been making eyes at the man she’d invited to be my date. “Connor and I are talking about the exhibit. What do you think?”

I looked to Connor, who didn’t meet my eyes. I wondered what he had said to Audrey about the show. To me, he had said that framing women’s deaths as art was a gross practice. From the way Audrey was smiling, I doubted that was what he had said to her.

“It was really something,” I said noncommittally. “Audrey, I think you met Max earlier.”

“Sure, hi,” she said, then glanced down at her phone, thumbs moving as she responded to a comment on Instagram.

Max shot me a pleading look; Connor had yet to make eye contact with me.

If you don’t do something, you’re going to have to stand here and watch Audrey and Connor flirt all night, a small voice said nastily in my ear.

“Max and I were just catching up, and I think you guys have a lot in common,” I said, my voice sounding false to my own ears.

“Yeah?” Audrey asked, looking up and scanning Max’s body appraisingly.

I glanced over at him, trying to see him through Audrey’s eyes, and blanched. What had I been thinking? This would never work. Max Metcalf, earnest and slightly disheveled, wasn’t Audrey’s type. She went for men like Nick, choosing swagger and vanity muscles over things like intellect and character.

A person never forgets camp.

But what if that had been a threat? Max looked harmless, but what if he wasn’t? What if he told Audrey or, worse, Connor about that hideous summer? Panic flickered in my chest. I couldn’t give Max any reason to make good on that threat. It could jeopardize everything I’d worked so hard for. If all I had to do to protect my future was push a date on Audrey, I was more than happy to do it.

“Yeah,” I said, hoping Audrey didn’t hear my voice wavering. “Maybe you two should get together sometime.”

“Any friend of Cat’s is a friend of mine,” she said with a shrug. From her purse, she produced a business card and handed it to Max. “Here.”

He looked down at it and frowned faintly. “What’s this?”

“My Instagram handle. Direct message me sometime, and we’ll grab coffee.”

“Oh,” he said, fingering the card’s edges. “Right. Sure. Okay, I’ll just download—”

“Wait,” Audrey interrupted, looking amused. “Don’t tell me you don’t have Instagram. Cat, are all of your friends technophobes like yourself?”

I faltered, but Max smiled easily. “I did have Instagram. Once. But I kept getting inundated with messages from Russian porn bots, and dealing with that didn’t seem worth being able to post the occasional picture of coffee or cool album cover.”

“Depends on how cool those album covers were,” she said with a slight smile. She reached into her purse again and retrieved a pen, which she used to scrawl her phone number across the card she’d handed him. “Here. Let’s leave the bots out of things. Text me.”

My stomach turned sour with regret. I’d thought only of the short-term, and completely neglected to consider the long-term implications of setting them up. What if things went well? What if they started dating? How could I ever relax knowing that at any moment, Max Metcalf could be revealing my dark past to my best friend? But it was too late. The wheels were already in motion, and all I could do was hope to not get flattened.





CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO





AUDREY


I hadn’t had a boyfriend since Nick. Izzy blamed Nick for emotionally scarring me (he hadn’t), and my mother suggested I had never gotten over him (I had). My singledom had less to do with Nick and more to do with me enjoying being unencumbered. I liked not having to answer to anyone, liked being able to stay out until five in the morning without a boyfriend questioning me about my whereabouts. And I really liked being able to pour all my extra energy into building my online brand.

The first time Nick called me while he was in New York, I almost didn’t see him. We were only eight months out from graduation, and the last thing I wanted was to fall back into a relationship with him—and a long-distance one at that. But Nick was Nick, and I was powerless against his clear blue eyes and orthodontia-perfected smile. The next thing I knew, I was waking up beside him and already looking forward to seeing him when he was in town again. I thought I’d finally cracked the code: I got to enjoy my favorite parts of Nick without having to endure his less desirable bits, like the way he used to passively-aggressively “like” comments I made on other guys’ Facebooks or the way he never properly replaced the lid on anything.

Of course, I didn’t let my pseudo-relationship with Nick keep me from exploring other options. I dated occasionally, sometimes seeing someone as many as six or seven times. Most attempts, though, never got off the ground. Far too many dates started with the guy trying to impress me by interrogating the server about the wine list, and then either flat-out ordering for me or making heavy-handed suggestions. (“The only real option here is the branzino,” one particularly insufferable guy had told me, not long before he informed me that Paris was the only “real option” for a weekend getaway.) Depending on how the rest of the date was doing, I might play along or I might rebel. The branzino guy earned my scorn for not listening to me when I’d mentioned I was a vegetarian; I mocked him (without including his name or face—I wasn’t that cruel) in my Instagram Stories all night.