Chapter Thirty-Five Keely
Chapter Thirty-Five
Keely
Keely opened her bedroom door to find Max leaning on the wall opposite it.
“I guess I owe you some congratulations,” he said in a wry, cutting tone before she could corral her thoughts into a semblance of working order.
“What?” She blinked. How much had he heard? “Were you—were you listening to my phone call?” Dread, slimy and thick, curled through her stomach and wound out to her veins, turning her simultaneously ice cold and fire hot. “A phone call I wanted to take in private?”
His jaw ticked. “I got worried. I came to check on you and. . .” He blew air through his nose. “I heard the last part, about you being ‘very honored.’ It sounding like you were accepting something. When did you submit your application? So much for seeing it through to the end together.”
She reared back, catching herself on the door frame. Where was this anger coming from? “I told you, I haven’t yet.”
His laugh sliced through her skin and stuck her in the heart. “Sure you have. You just won the scholarship. Which doesn’t feel great, if I’m being honest.”
“I didn’t win the scholarship, Max.” She ran a hand through her hair. The claw clip slid down, and she ripped it out, taking a few strands with it. “The phone call had nothing to do with that.”
“Right.” Max’s gaze narrowed as his weight shifted. “So what did it have to do with?”
Fear pressed her lips together, and she shook her head. “I can’t tell you. I don’t want to jinx it.”
His gaze darkened. “Keely, I’m sorry, but I need a little more than that.”
She wrapped her arms around her torso, some of the ice in Max’s glare having dropped onto her skin. “Why can’t you trust me?”
“Trust should go both ways,” he countered. “And you’re clearly hiding something. Something to do with the scholarship that we’re both going for. I’m an open book here, Key—I sent you the essay you tried to take.”
“What does that have to do with this?”
“Because all I’ve been trying to do is help you, and you’re shutting me out.”
“That’s not fair.” And Keely was proud of herself for a second, because despite how badly her knees were shaking, her voice was resolute. “You’re the one who went AWOL these last few weeks. And I’ve been helping you too, with studying, with your grades—”
“Oh, were you ‘helping me study—’ ” he threw up lazy fingers around the words “—when you emailed me and told me class was canceled? Or when you tried to take my laptop?”
As if he didn’t give it back tenfold. “I thought we were. . .” in love, or on the way there. “Past that,” she finished weakly.
“And I thought,” he ground out, blinking hard.
His brows gathered on his forehead and he stared down at her.
“That we were in this together, going to see it through to the end. Which means you trusting me with whatever and whoever was on the other end of that phone call. Please.” He jerked his chin at her phone, tucked in her fist.
“I. . . I’m. . .”
He looked so earnest. And he, loath as she was to admit it, did have a point. If they were supposed to be together—to have a shot with each other after graduation in a few weeks—she needed to tell him.
The call hadn’t been anything, not really. She’d just been invited to formally apply. She still had so far to go, and it might not work out. What if this was the complete wrong decision?
She wanted to talk it through with him, ask his advice, but she couldn’t do that. Couldn’t ask him to give her reasons for and against pulling out of the scholarship when his own dreams were so entwined with it.
It all spun around in her head, and the words lodged in her throat. The harder she tried to push them, the bigger they swelled. Her entire life, she’d worked toward one thing, and now she was trapped in a current she’d made herself. She didn’t know how to get out. She couldn’t fight it.
Could she? What if the only reason she and Max worked so well was because of the Keely she was right now? If she changed, would they? Would they survive this fallout? She already felt like there was shrapnel in her heart whenever he looked at her lately.
And what would her parents say? Would her dad twist it around somehow to point the blame at her mom’s influence on Keely?
Keely’s giving up on her future, just like Veronica had given up on him.
Would her mom tell her dad it was his fault Keely was feeling so unstable, that she’d learned to make careless life decisions from him?
What about Zoey? Zoey, her very best friend, who Keely had already let down so many times this semester. Could she really say goodbye to their shared dream of Caltech?
She just needed a few more days to wrap her head around it all.
Days she didn’t have.
Teeth sunk into her bottom lip, she shook her head.
His face fell, and Keely’s body ached like she’d taken the plunge instead.
“I, uh. . .” His jaw clicked as he ground his teeth together. “I don’t think this is working.”
Pinpricks of pain shot through her heart. More of that shrapnel, digging deep. Her brain worked overtime making sense of his words, but it was tired. She was tired. “This, as in—”
“Us.” Max expelled air in a quick, rough burst. “Being together.”
Keely’s chest caved in like her ribs had collapsed, but when she glanced down, she was still whole. “If you give me a little more time to work this out, I’ll—”
“A few more days won’t change the fact that we both can’t win the scholarship.” A garbled, strangling sort of noise escaped his throat. “One of us is going to lose. Are you prepared for that to be you?”
Her heart beat an odd rhythm in her chest. She pressed a hand there, grounding herself the way he’d taught her to on the track. In this very bedroom. “You’re so sure you’re going to win?”
He threw up a hand, let loose a sharp laugh. “It doesn’t matter who wins, Keely. We’re going to lose something either way.”
That didn’t make sense. What would she lose if she won? She searched every valley and crest of his face for the answers. The downturn of his mouth. The harsh angles of his jaw.
He wouldn’t lift his gaze, and that was answer enough.
Him. She’d lose Max.
“Oh,” she whispered. She didn’t trust herself to speak any louder. “You’d rather. . . stop now?”
The corners of his eyes were glassy, his dark eyelashes fluttering as he blinked. “It’s easier this way.” Raw pain seeped under the cracks in his voice. “You’re moving to California at the end of the summer anyway, aren’t you? And I’ll be traveling with the team for most of that.”
She inhaled once, twice, quicker.
“Breathe,” he reminded her, gruff and reluctant.
Keely forced out her air, messy, like he’d taught her. Max was the only person she’d ever let herself be messy around. “Is now the time where we say we’re going to try and still be friends?”
“I don’t think I can be friends with you,” he muttered.
The slight stung more than she’d expected. Of course he couldn’t. She didn’t have anything to offer him, now that his grades were better. Now that he’d gotten what he wanted from her. The hurt compounded with the pain already in her chest and set off a chemical reaction.
Her nose, face, everything burned. “Silly me, I forgot. You don’t have friends.
” She threw up a hand. “You have teammates you push away over and over. Tell me, Max, what’s going to happen in a few weeks?
Who’s going to be there for you after you graduate, and you’re not all trapped in a locker room together anymore? ”
His jaw unhinged, and he finally turned his amber eyes on her.
They were molten, hardened, on fire. Anguish sharpened his features into blades, designed specifically to cut her.
“I don’t need them. Running is a solo sport.
And I’m damn good at it. I have a legacy.
I’m building a legacy, something my family will be proud of.
Something my father—” his voice cracked as he pointed a finger at his heart “—will be proud of. And at least I’m honest about who I am.
You think you’re so much nicer than me, that you have all these amazing friends, but if you looked up from your precious checklists once in a while, you’d realize that all you have is a network of people to use when it’s convenient.
Who are you taking with you to your shiny new life in California except someone who, last I heard, still isn’t talking to you? ”
Her chest caved in around the dagger he’d shoved there. Was he right? “That’s not. . .” A tear slipped down her cheek.
Max reached for her for a split second, his hand suspended between them, before he curled his fingers into a fist. He blinked several times in succession.
“So,” she tried again. Her voice was just as shaky. She collected her stray tears with shaking fingers. “This is it.”
His throat bobbed, and he went back to staring at the wall instead of her. “It was always going to end up here one way or another.”
He didn’t slam the door when he left. She wished he had, because then she would have been able to blame the crackling, broken sound on something other than her heart, shredding to pieces in her chest.