Trade Me (Cyclone #1)(58)

Blake is still barely eating my mother’s food, even though he does a valiant job of moving it around on his plate.

My fight with my mom infects everything. I thought it would be better if she didn’t embarrass me, but it’s not. She’s silent, and that cold silence cuts more deeply than any embarrassment.

I try to apologize to her on Sunday morning before we leave.

“Did you mean it?” she asks.

And—because I did—I pause.

She shakes her head. “Don’t say sorry, then, when you’re not.”

By the time I get in the car with Blake, I’m not sure if I’m relieved to be leaving this mess behind me or if I’m heartbroken that I’ve f*cked things up so badly with my mom. I wait until we swap our loaned Toyota for his Tesla.

“We should stop and have lunch,” I say. “And breakfast. You must be starving.”

He’s driving when I say this. I can see his face go still. His fingers close on the wheel.

“I’m not hungry.” His tone is casual, but there’s a tightness to his face. “Your mother fed me really, really well.”

“Come on, Blake,” I say. “You don’t need to lie to me. I was watching you the entire weekend. You ate about as much as I did, and you’re a foot taller than me.”

“I’m not a foot taller than you.”

“Nine inches. Whatever. And Dad says you went on a two-hour run on Friday when we were at the hearing. It’s okay. You’re not going to offend me if you don’t like my mother’s cooking. It’s an acquired taste.”

“There was nothing wrong with your mother’s food,” he says quietly.

“Oh, so you eat like that all the time?” I say sarcastically.

This is met with silence. His jaw sets. I rummage through my memory, looking for evidence that he’s lying. But what I remember instead is…

Blake at our first lunch together, eating a handful of bean sprouts. Blake at lunch with his father, taking a spoonful of rice and some dal. Blake telling me he won’t let me cook for him because it would be cheating. I can remember him eating apples occasionally. And… And…

“Oh my God,” I say, this time with no sarcasm at all. “You eat like that all the time.”

His eyes stare ahead. His face is too still.

“Blake…”

I look over at him.

He exhales.

“Blake. Are you okay?”

For a long moment, he doesn’t say anything. He just drives, his jaw set in a hard line.

“No.” When he finally speaks, his voice is hoarse. “No. I don’t think that I am.” His hand opens on the wheel and then clenches once more. “I have a problem. I’ve been…trying to fix it, but that hasn’t really worked.” He lets out a long breath.

“Does anyone know?”

“You.”

There are now only two weeks until the launch. Two weeks and then I walk away. I’m not supposed to care about him.

Not caring, not worrying—these are not things I can do on command. And I’ve been lying to myself, pretending that it will be bearable to watch him walk away. No. Here’s one thing that will hurt more: knowing that I had the chance to make him feel a little better, and I chose not to.

“I know.” He swallows. “It’s stupid. It’s so f*cking stupid, I’m mad at myself. I know it’s stupid. I know I’m stupid. How hard is it to f*cking eat more?” His voice is shaking. “But I don’t. I can’t. And when I try, when I make myself—I end up going out for a run.”

“You need to talk to someone about this,” I say.

“I should be able to fix this myself. Dad thinks I can run a company. I can’t even f*cking control myself.”

“Blake. It’s okay.”

He shakes his head. “No. It’s not. You know what? That day in class—that day you got so mad at me? Afterward, you said you didn’t have time for my bullshit apology. And I was so f*cking jealous. I wanted to not have time for my bullshit, either.”

“Hey.” I reach over and take his hand.

“You were right,” he says shakily. “I thought your life would be magic. Like it would somehow make this better. That if I just had what you had, I wouldn’t…do this. But we’ve never traded, not really. None of this has done a damned thing. It’s not my life that’s f*cked up. It’s me.”

I don’t want to care. I don’t want to hurt because he hurts. But here I am, caring anyway, and it scares me. It scares me, but still, I squeeze his hand. He glances down, as if realizing for the first time that I’m touching him. That our fingers are intertwined. That the current of electricity is arcing between us uninterrupted.

And then he lifts his head and truly looks at me. There’s a raw hunger in him, something bigger than what he’s just admitted.

There’s a lot of truth in what my mother told me. I don’t let myself have fun. I pull away from people who could be my friends. I refuse to let people help me. And right now, I realize that Blake and I have a lot in common—a lot more than either of us can admit.

“Do you remember when you told me that you’d bought something ridiculously luxurious, and it was a mango?” he asks. “I was so f*cking jealous of you. I wished that I could feel what that was like. I wanted to want something like that. I wanted to have that so badly.”