Never Sweeter (Dark Obsession #1)(29)

“No, but they make the people who have them look that way. They make you look like a big, lumbering oaf or….” He paused, clearly struggling. Though it was only after the next part that she realized why, exactly. “Or like some brainless lunkhead,” he finished.

And then it hit her, hard and right in the heart.

That was what she had called him.

“Oh, like that means anything coming from a brainless lunkhead,” she had said, shaky and over her shoulder, while running away. But even so, it was there. And more important, it had affected him. It had affected him so strongly that he still remembered it now. She had thought he would just shrug it off, that it would mean nothing to him, but it had.

It was making him hide right now, his face the only thing visible above the waterline. And when she drifted close, he was the one who backed away. He was the one who seemed shy now.

“I was just trying to get back at you, Tate.”

“I know that. I know. I don’t think you did anything wrong. It’s just now I can’t help wondering…is that how you see me? Do you still see me that way sometimes? Like at the party, I caught you looking at me. And your expression seemed to say ‘Oh look at that dumbass with his dumb jock friends.’?”

“Probably because that’s what I did think—until you came over and were as cool to me as you were in the library. Because you know I was still afraid then. I still thought that maybe you would just switch back to the guy you were before, now that it wasn’t just you and me. But can you blame me? This guy, the one I’m talking to now, the one who admits mistakes and says sorry and has epic conversations with me about Dirty Dancing…I’ve only just met him. I don’t have four years of experiences with him to lean into.”

“I wish you did. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time in high school.”

“In what way do you think you wasted your time?”

She expected him to hesitate then. To give her a chance to prepare herself for what was coming.

But he didn’t. He just came right out with it, like he’d always had it locked and loaded.

All he needed was someone to ask, so he could fire the thing directly into their heart.

“I thought being cool was the most important thing. So much so that I actually used to hide books I was reading inside skin mags. Once I got sent to the principal’s office because I kept answering questions in this smart-ass way, like I didn’t know. But I did know. I always f*cking knew. I f*cking know now, but still get this clenching feeling whenever I go to raise my hand.”

She stopped then with the clothes. Her arm was still half in and half out of the sweater, but it didn’t matter. What mattered were those words, and the way they just upended her whole world. Everything she thought she knew about him, gone in an instant.

Not just gone: obliterated.

“You made fun of me for things you actually wanted to do. You called me a f*cking nerd, like, a million times, and all the while you were just dying to do the same things.”

“That…was kind of the case, yeah.”

“Oh my god. Oh my god, Tate, why didn’t you just…” She threw up her hands, splashing water in two arcs. “Why didn’t you just join me? Why didn’t you stop and just come and talk to me like you talk to me now? You didn’t have to hide books in f*cking skin mags—I would have let you read them right in front of me without a goddamn word about it. I would have been happy to have you there!”

“I know that. Do you not think I know that? You’re doing it right now. It literally took me like nothing at all to persuade you to accept me and let me sit with you and read with you and do all this nerdy shit,” he said, getting louder and louder as he went. He had to take a steadying breath, just to make the rest of his speech come out normal. “It wasn’t just you I f*cked over. I f*cked myself over. Our lives are forever changed because I was too much of a coward to really go for…to really…to really be who I wanted to be.”

“It’s not too late though.”

“That’s really kind of you to say, honey, but I know it is.”

“I’m not just being kind. Look at everything you are now.”

“I’m a wrestler now. That shit is set in stone—there’s no going back. My scholarship is based on it. My whole future is built around it. If I stop, my family will see it as me throwing away millions of dollars. I will be throwing away millions of dollars. And for what? A few books I want to read?”

“I don’t think it’s just about a few books you want to read.”

“Then what do you think it’s about? How else would you put it?”

“You hate wrestling, Tate. You hate it. Like, a lot.”

She could see he’d been about to say something more. Protest the point, maybe, in a pretty fierce tone. But then something seemed to stop him. It made him stutter when he finally did get some words out, always on the verge of shaking his head but never quite managing it all the way.

“I…I wouldn’t say that I…I mean not hate, exactly.”

“It sounds a lot like hate to me, bub.”

“No, no. I mean there are things I like about it.”

“Yeah? Can you name three for me right now?”

“Absolutely I…” he started, but even he seemed to know he was never going to finish. It took around five seconds to cover his eyes one-handed as realization set in. “Okay, maybe I hate it a little. Like, the weighins are usually not a lot of fun. I don’t think I’ve eaten cake in ten years. And then there’s my knees and most of my joints and the constant ringing I have in one ear. By the time I’m thirty I’m probably gonna have the body of an eighty-year-old, if I even make it that far, and—”