Scandalized(73)

“So why did you bother staying in LA?” I ask. “Why aren’t you in London, figuring it out with Sunny?”

He stares at me and then blinks away, jaw tight. I wait another few seconds for an answer before I realize one isn’t coming.

Whatever, I think. Say your piece. Be done. I swallow, pushing the next words out. “Your loyalty to the people in your life is one of the things that I love most about you.” He snaps his attention back to my face. “But what about me?” I ask, and the dam breaks. “You decided to protect your sister, and I understand, but you threw me away so quickly. When things first started with us, the story was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me. But then, all of a sudden, you were the biggest thing that had ever happened to me. And here I ended up with neither.”

Alec sucks in a shaking breath, nostrils flared. “I know.”

“You told me you were going to do your best to make me love you,” I say, “and then twelve hours later had me get my shit out of your hotel room and told me you were leaving town and to ‘please take care.’ I realize I’ve only had you for fourteen days, and Sunny is your blood, but it still tore me in half to be thrown away like that. You could have at least talked to me.”

He opens his mouth but closes it again. I expect him to argue, but he says only, “You’re right. I could have.”

“I’m so glad I left the Batphone here,” I tell him, and he takes this like a shove to his chest. “I would have been checking it constantly. It would have killed me to see you this morning, knowing you were in town this whole time.”

“Gigi—”

I cut him off, pointing to the bag on my doorstep. “You thought I was inside, didn’t you? You weren’t even going to talk to me. Did you just swing by here on your way to the airport to leave my crap on my porch?”

Alec blinks away, staring at the ground. “I think you’re making a lot of assumptions right now.”

“You know what? I don’t actually care what you think anymore.”

In response to this, Alec bites his lip, nodding like I’ve hit my target. A horn honks at the curb, pulling his attention to the open stairwell as he says, “I wish we could just go back in time to Seattle and decide to stay there for two weeks and fuck everything else. This has been the best two weeks of my life and the worst three days of my life.”

This truth hits with startling accuracy. I hate how the easiest and most passionate relationship of my life has been trashed by circumstance. I hate the way Alec is taking the hit. And I hate that the thing I admire deeply about him—his sense of duty to his family, to the public—means that he’s doing exactly what everyone who knows him knew he would do. Alec never gets to belong to himself. Except with me, I realize. This thing that hurt me so acutely after our first night is now the deepest truth between us: He’s been real with me from that very first minute in Seattle. He knows I can handle myself. He doesn’t have to be my protector.

Suddenly my anger dissipates. I can’t let it be like this if this is the last time I see him. He looks like he hasn’t slept or eaten. I remember hating Spence enough to not even want to see his face but that isn’t the case here. I can hate Alec and myself and this situation forever, but I don’t want angry silence to be my last memory of him.

“Have you slept? Eaten anything?” I study his face, his posture, his rumpled clothes. He doesn’t look like any version of Alec Kim I’ve ever imagined. “You look terrible.”

His eyes search mine, and I remember what he asked me in the hotel that first day in LA—can see the question in his eyes right now: How mad can you be if you’re looking at me like that?

I feel it, too, that I’m not glaring at him with anger, but watching him with carefully protected adoration. I blink and startle in surprise when tears streak down my face. I didn’t even realize I’d started to cry. Alec takes a step closer, but I immediately take a step back. “Don’t.”

“Gigi…”

“I’m not going to invite you inside.” I swipe at my face. “I can’t.”

Alec nods. “Probably a good idea. I wouldn’t want to leave if I went inside with you.”

Confused, I chew my lip, fighting the way a sob wants to rise up and rip out of me. Right now, he looks like he loves me.

“Okay,” I say. “Have a good trip.”

“Read what I wrote,” he says, nodding to the bag. Alec takes a step forward and bends, pressing his lips to my cheek. When he straightens, he lifts his eyes up and over my shoulder and seems to throw an anchor there in the distance, needing something to propel himself forward. I stare at the shopping bag, listening to his footsteps as he jogs down the stairwell. I curl my toes into the soles of my shoes to keep from following after him. A minute later, an engine starts, a car pulls from the curb, and this time, Alec Kim is really on his way out of LA.





Twenty-One


My biggest worry about being back in my bed is unfounded: there isn’t any trace of Alec in here. I set the shopping bag down and pick up a pillow, pressing it to my face. The sheets are crisp and smell like fabric softener. Eden. She got rid of his things, too—the toothbrush, the swim trunks. If there was anything else he might have left here, I’ll never know.