What If (If Only.... #2)(48)

“Griffin. You’re freaking me out. What are you doing?”

Once stopped, I throw the car into park and turn off the ignition. When I face her, the fear in her eyes dissipates when she sees what’s in mine—not anger, not sadness. Just regret. Her hand reaches for my face, cupping my cheek.

“Did you fall in love with her anyway?”

I nod, the first time I’ve admitted this to anyone, including myself. Not saying the word, not acknowledging how I felt, helped me get back to old habits. Safe habits. But I thought I was safe back then, and I wasn’t. With Maggie, I knew that first night the danger I was in, but I lied to myself anyway.

“She was in love with someone else,” I tell her.

She shakes her head. “The guy with her at the reunion.” I nod again. “I’m sorry, Griffin. It wasn’t my business, and I…I shouldn’t have gotten so angry. That had nothing to do with you.”

My hand covers hers, holding it there, the heat from her palm warming me as the temperature in the car slowly drops.

“It is bullshit,” I tell her. “But it’s all I’ve ever known, and it’s always been enough.”

She keeps her eyes locked on mine when she asks the next question.

“Do you still love her?”

I shake my head without hesitation.

“No. I don’t. It’s been two years already. But I remember what it was like, her kissing me when I knew she wanted to be with him. I’m the * for letting it go on as long as it did. I don’t want to be that * again.”

She lowers her hand, and I loosen my grip.

“So the anger that you said has nothing to do with me? Anything you want to tell me?”

A long, slow breath exits her lips, and for several seconds she says nothing.

“No,” she says, a finality in her tone. “We should probably get back on the road if we want to check in before the party.”

With that she straightens in her seat, her head finding its resting spot on the cool glass of the passenger window.

We’ve kept ourselves closed off enough since the day we met that I realize I know nothing more about her beyond what she’s let me see. Little by little she has cracked my resistance, slipped into the parts of me I tried to hide as well. And she’s still here. But for every space I let her fill, she bottles up another one of her own.

She’s right. It’s bullshit. All of it. When it comes to Maggie, it’s no longer enough.





Chapter Seventeen


Maggie


If there was a third person on the trip with us, her name would be Awkward Silence. And yes, she’d be a girl because, well, she’s me. We made it through the rest of the drive with ample small talk about tastes in music and playing the alphabet game with road signs and license plates. But that was simply noise to fill an ever-widening gap. One that I created, have been creating even as Griffin and I have been seeing each other more.

Now I follow him in that same silence down a hotel corridor, wheeling my suitcase behind me to the room we’ll share tonight, wondering if we’ll really share anything more than the same space, the same pocket of time.

When he unlocks the door, he holds it open, ushering me through first, and when he follows behind, we both stop short at what lies before us. Thirty-six stories above the street, a picture window looks out over Lake Michigan. Griffin whistles while I gasp, and our shared reaction brings laughter from him and from me, and somehow the distance lessens, if only by a fraction of space, but it lessens nonetheless.

“Pretend you drew a WILD card,” I tell him, searching for a way to stitch the gap even tighter.

“What?” he asks, his eyes abandoning the view for me.

“The Uno deck,” I say. “A WILD card means you get to ask me anything. Pretend you drew a WILD.”

Once the request is out there, I walk from the entrance across the elegant room to the window seat. The setting sun has the city ablaze in lights, their reflections dancing off the water. I sit, and wait, the promise—or maybe threat—of a question hanging in the air.

I hear him move, his footsteps padding across the carpeted floor. In the reflection of the glass I watch him perch on the edge of the king-sized bed, listen to his exhales, sounds that denote thought. And I wait.

“Tell me about someone you were in love with.”

It’s not a question, but his request asks so much. I spin around on the bench, let my back rest against the tall window. My lips press together in a line, and I shake my head, giving him what he asks for—the truth.

His brows rise in challenge before he reacts with words.

“You’ve never been in love with anyone?”

I laugh, though my expression feels like anything but a smile.

Now his brows pinch together. “I don’t get it,” he says.

I shrug, having answered his question. I don’t have to tell him that in high school I was too focused on AP classes, on earning a full-ride to college so I wouldn’t break my grandparents with loans. I don’t explain that once my grandfather passed away, I started working at the coffee shop, even before starting at the U, to help offset my living expenses. Anyone I’d met, anyone I could have fallen for, wasn’t enough of a distraction to warrant the time away from more important endeavors. I sure as hell don’t let him in on how I lost my scholarship after sophomore year, when I could no longer attend classes full-time…or at all for what would have technically been my junior year.