Thirty-Eight
THE FOUR HUNDRED OTHER PEOPLE IN THIS TENT DISAPPEAR.
My focus narrows to where Jackson’s fingers grip me, holding tight enough that the skin of my arm whitens. It doesn’t hurt—it’s just unexpected. Jackson’s touch was always painfully gentle. He pushed strands of hair behind my ears, held the small of my back when we were going through doors or up stairs, slid dress zippers down so slowly, I would shiver.
His fingers now aren’t gentle. They’re frantic.
“Tell me what you’re doing,” he demands, his voice shaking. Not with anger.
With fear, I realize.
Why does he still care so much and not enough?Never enough.
I rip my wrist from his grasp, realizing I can’t deny it any longer. He knew my plans. He could destroy me if he wanted.
He already did.
“You can’t seriously think you could”—he looks around, lowering his voice—“steal from these people. You’re just a kid.”
Indignation fires through me. I straighten. “Why not?” My voice is sturdy, my gaze challenging.
His eyes widen with shock at my confirmation. “This isn’t you.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “Olivia, talk to me, please. Something is going on with you, and I just—”
I cut him off, not able to hear him tell me one more time I’m better than this. “No,” I say firmly. “This is me, Jackson. Maybe you didn’t really know me, or maybe you just wanted me to be someone I wasn’t. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to worry about me anymore. You’re not my boyfriend. You’re not anything to me.”
The words hit him like punches to the softest parts of him. My heart cracks with his pain, an instinct I need to outgrow. Just because he seems like the boy I loved—just because it’s impossible to remember his betrayal alongside the way he texted me good night every night—doesn’t mean this is real. It never was.
Which is what makes my feelings right now incomprehensible. Inscrutable. A cipher without a key.
No matter how much Jackson hurt me, I don’t like hurting him. I wish I did, but I don’t.
I feel my phone vibrate in my purse and seize desperately on the distraction. Maybe someone in the crew has turned up a lead. Direction. Phases. The job.
That’s what’s real.
I just need to get away from Jackson.
“Look,” I continue, letting my voice soften with the guilt I shouldn’t feel, “if you want to start making amends for what you did to me, then stay out of this, Jackson.”
His gaze, cloudy with hurt, suddenly clears. He fixes his eyes on me, and fire unfurls in them. “For the last time,” he says, his voice low and furious, “I didn’t do anything. If you loved me the way I loved you, you would believe me.”
I know what he’s doing. I hear the ultimatum in his words.
He’s using months of make outs, of movie nights, of the soccer practices on East Coventry’s patchy field that I spent happily ignoring the history reading I meant to do, of ice cream dates when I was discouraged—strawberry for me, chocolate-chip cookie dough for him—like weapons. Plans I could hardly comprehend myself whispering—maybe one day we’ll go to Paris and see the Eiffel Tower from our window and sleep in the same bed every night—like incriminating confessions.
Love like leverage.
He wants me to soften or retreat. I’ve wondered in these past weeks whether he ever really understood me. Now I’m certain he didn’t.
If he had, he would know Olivia Owens doesn’t retreat.
I look right into his eyes, where the chandelier reflects like dewdrop diamonds. The effect is not unlike the half-pleading pain in his expression. It’s not the real thing—it only looks like it.
For once, I hide nothing in my heart. For the fastest moment, I unleash into my voice all the hurt, the anger, the longing I’ve felt for weeks.
“I think it’s clear,” I say, “we never loved each other at all.”
Without waiting for Jackson’s reaction, I leave.