People Like Us(76)

I can’t stop the words from coming out of my mouth, though. “Are you seeing someone?”

“Maybe.”

“Oh. Me too.” I try to look casual, but I can feel my face morphing into pre-crying mode.

“How can you possibly be upset about that?”

“I’m not.”

He takes a sip of coffee. “Maybe part of our whole problem was that we went all in on this Brie-and-Justine-versus-Kay-and-Spencer thing.”

“I shouldn’t have turned it into a competition.”

“God, Katie, give Brie some credit. The pedestal thing is disturbing.” He sighs and reaches his hand across the table, but mine feels too heavy to meet him halfway, so he leans his chin on his elbow and gazes up at me. “I really am always going to love you.”

“As a friend,” I say, rolling my eyes.

“As you,” he says seriously. “No matter what either of us ever does.”

I do know. It’s how I keep loving Todd, even after what he did. Todd took Megan away. My Megan. The trivia champ of John Butler Junior High, a cookie connoisseur, and a champion snuggler. We had, between us, seven secret identities, and we could communicate in Sindarin, one of J. R. R. Tolkien’s elven languages. And Todd destroyed her. And I still love him.

I push Spencer’s hands away. “I don’t want you to.”

His eyes cloud up and he looks down, shading his face with his hand. “Why do you keep calling me?”

I feel stuffed and sick but I force myself to keep eating just to have something to do. “I don’t want you to love me out of habit. I don’t want you stuck with that. It’ll ruin you, Spence. I am not worth holding on to.”

He looks up at me with the grin that used to make my heart jump. He was my secret keeper. Marked as mine. But now his eyes are shining wet, and it just makes me want to rewind to the day we met so when he sat down beside me I could tell him, “Run, Spencer. Don’t look back. Run.”

“Don’t smile at me.”

“Why?” He presses his lips together.

“Because it’s weird. You’re crying and smiling and it’s weird.”

“I’m happy and sad. Deal with it. So, what is this, our seventh breakup?”

“We weren’t together.”

“Now we’re not allowed to be friends? Is that why you wanted to meet? To tell me that?”

“No. God.” Shit. If I shine at one thing, it’s making a bigger mess of an already spectacular screwup. “I wanted to see you. Everything’s really messed up right now. But you keep telling me you love me, and that reminds me why we can’t—”

“You’re right. That’s my fault.” He wipes his eyes on his sleeve. “I totally failed to pick up on that. Katie, you will not be loved by me ever again. My good opinion of you, once had, is lost forever.”

“Were you watching Pride and Prejudice, too?”

“It’s long. But it taught me it’s okay to marry beneath my station.”

“Did you catch Death Comes to Pemberley, too?”

“Come again?”

“It’s another book. The gang gets back together and a minor character is killed off. It’s a murder mystery.”

“Is it on Netflix?”

“Spencer, we have to talk about Jessica.”

He chokes on his coffee. “I thought you were done with this murder thing?”

“Do you realize how serious this is? We are now the police’s only suspects.”

“How is that possible?”

“I was at the scene of the crime, have no alibi, they found something of mine in Jessica’s room that night, and it turns out I did something pretty mean to her a couple of years ago.” He tilts his head, interested. “And the police may think she slept with you to get back at me.”

“Well. Doesn’t that make me feel precious.”

“It makes it look like Jessica and I had an ongoing feud or something.”

“And I’m presumably a suspect because of my deadly sex curse. What about Greg?”

I take a second doughnut and scrape off some of the glazed sugar absently. “He has no link to Maddy.”

He takes a cautious sip of coffee. “Her death could be unrelated.”

“Greg told me something else that’s interesting. The police think they have the murder weapon. And someone tried to frame him by taking one from his house and planting it in the lake. But now they have the real one and they’re running DNA tests.”

He looks at me evenly. “Sounds like we’re in the clear, then.”

“You’re not going to ask what the weapon was?”

He holds my gaze for a moment. “Sure.”

“A broken wine bottle.”



* * *



? ? ?

I GRIPPED THAT bottle so tightly the night of the murder. I don’t actually remember putting it down from the moment I left Tai and the others and went looking for Spencer. It seemed like we had been kissing for hours when his phone rang the second time, but it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. In that time we’d made our way into his car, clothes off, underwear on, heat blasting, music pulsing. The buzz from the alcohol was fading into a smoother, steadier blur of desire and determination. I was determined not to think of Brie, not to picture Spencer with another girl, not to remember the look on his face when he saw me with Brie.