Begin Again(97)

I know I can’t run away. But the crush of it all comes rushing back just the same—the grades, the radio show, my deeply inconvenient crush on a boy who is leaving me behind. The things I’ve been avoiding all day that will still be my problem tomorrow.

“Let me just send a quick text to Milo.”

I try to bite back my guilt with little success, texting a profuse apology and letting him know I meant for Shay to tell him I was with my grandmas and I’ll be back soon. I want to go into more detail or just call back, but if I am triaging the little disasters in my orbit right now, a near-tears Valeria who just up and drove two hours for my help is priority number one.

I set the phone down, shifting on the couch to level with her. “You really have feelings for Shay? Like . . . you know for sure now?”

I ask both for Valeria’s sake and for Shay’s. I don’t want either of them risking each other’s hearts if they’re not both 100 percent on the same page—and if I know Shay, I suspect she still is. She’s just worried about getting hurt all over again.

“I’ve always known,” says Valeria, withdrawing into some quiet place in herself. “Now I just have to make her believe it.”

She glances over at me then like she needs confirmation I believe her, too. Which means that it’s probably time for me to fess up.

“I’ve known, too,” I say. “You were the Bea who called into the radio show, huh?”

Valeria presses her lips together sheepishly. She must have made the connection that I was the Squire she’d confessed to after I accidentally put myself on blast yesterday. “Yeah.”

One of her hands is resting on the couch. I lean forward and put mine on top of hers, giving it a small squeeze. “I gave you bad advice.”

Valeria stares down at our hands, the words coming out in a mumble. “I didn’t give you the full story.”

I tilt my head at her. “What is the full story, then?”

“I don’t think I even understood it until this weekend,” she says. “This thing with Connor—it was about him, but I think it was also about me. I’ve just been scared.”

“Of what?”

Valeria draws into herself a bit more. “I’ve been writing romance for so long, but with Connor everything was so different from other people I’d dated. It was the first time I understood how a single person could affect me that much. So much that it bled into everything else.” Valeria looks at me with caution in her eyes, worried she’s said too much. When I hold her gaze, she adds, “I was just afraid of that, I think. Of letting love in, knowing that it could have that power over me.”

“I think it’s supposed to, to some degree,” I say carefully, ignoring the pang in my chest when I realize I understand exactly what Valeria’s talking about with Connor. How if I’d really taken a good, hard look at my life, I would have known it for years. “The difference is how you use that power. Whether you use it to undermine or support.”

Valeria sinks deeper into the couch. “And that’s the kind of person Shay is,” she says. “Someone who’s got your back no matter what.”

“Yeah,” I agree, and not for the first time, send a silent thank-you to MTV for scooping up her last roommate so she could be mine. “She is.”

“I just needed time to heal that feeling, before I could really let myself trust it again,” says Valeria. “Because what I feel for Shay—it feels even bigger. And at first that made it scarier. Easier to try to ignore. But with Shay . . . I really hope I haven’t messed things up too much. Because whatever we’re going to be to each other, I hope it’s for a long time.”

I nod, knowing exactly what she means. Milo, Shay, Valeria—at some point we crossed that line with one another, and I can feel the full force of my gratitude for it in this moment now.

“I’m sorry, Andie,” says Valeria. “I know that’s how you thought of Connor, too.”

This day has been long enough to feel like a year, and there’s a strange relief in that—even thoughts of Connor feel faraway.

“I think we’ve wasted more than enough headspace on him.”

This time Valeria’s the one to squeeze my hand. “I know. But I still want to say—I’m sorry. I know it wasn’t either of our faults, but I’m sorry that it happened to you.”

I don’t know if I’ll ever get any real closure from Connor. If we’ll ever be able to talk again, or if it will always be this open-ended, confusing thing that defined my life until it didn’t. But there is closure in this. Certainty in it. Something more unshakable than what I had with Connor.

“I’m sorry it happened to you, too.”

We hold our hands there for a moment, a beat punctuating the understanding we already had. Then Valeria shifts her hand away with a quiet smile.

“Well,” she says, “the good news is, this whole realization kind of freed up my brain. I . . . actually have an ending to the book now.”

“Oh yeah?” I ask. “What is it?”

Valeria looks at her shoulder bag shyly. “Do you want to read it?”

It’s strange how I already know the ending before she hands it over—how I can see it in the gleam in her eye, in the hopefulness of her brows. How my chest is already warm with the same certainty of it the way I am with this moment now.