Page 83 of Hate Me Like You Mean It

He let out a long, defeated breath. “As in I’ll draft a public apology for your brother, admit to the smear campaign, and I’ll… we can go see my mom tomorrow so the two of you can chat. You win.”

My heart gave a heavy, warningthunk.

“And then what?” I asked stupidly.

His jaw worked, his weary eyes meeting mine again. “Then we do what you said. No more of this… whatever it is. I can’t keep track anymore.” He looked down at his coffee, thumbing the lid. “We leave each other alone. Permanently, this time. I won’t have anything to do with you. You won’t have anything to do with me.” He hesitated. Swallowed. “We might as well be strangers.”

What…

What thefuck.

“No.”

The refusal sniped out of my mouth, running ahead of my brain, which was too busy spinning incoherent, panicked thoughts to mind the filter it was supposed to be monitoring twenty-four-seven.

Dominic buffered for a few seconds, his mouth twitching wordlessly. Then, “What?”

Don’t say it again.

Do NOT?—

“No. I don’t accept.”

“You… you don’t accept,” he parroted out of sheer disbelief. “I’m forfeiting. And you don’t accept.”

I took a lengthy drag from my coffee despite the alarming speed of my pulse. “No, because here’s the thing, Dom. You and I still have a shit ton of unfinished business. You know why? Because we still haven’t sat down andtalked. We’ve been driving each other up every wall, in every possible direction, but westill haven’t talked. We’re not eighteen anymore. You’re an adult; I’m an adult; so why is it that we can’t shut the hell up for five fucking minutes, get our heads out of our asses, and actuallytalk?

“Because here’s the other thing, bud: something’s not adding up. And if you’d been here this morning—if you’d answered asingle one of my phone calls after you up and left me without so much as a fucking goodbye—I would have brought it up like I planned, and we’d have sat down over a nice cup of coffee, figured our shit out like normal human beings, and called it a day. And if you think I’m letting you run away again before you give me a straight answer to every single one of the questions I’m about to throw at you, you’ve severely misjudged who you’re dealing with.

“Because here’s theotherother thing, and get ready, because this one’s a doozy: you don’t hate me. Not really. And I’m not so sure anymore that you ever did, which… I know, mind-blowing, right? You might hateyourselfbecause of how much you don’t hate me, but you definitely don’t hate me.

“And I know what you’re thinking—how the hell does that make sense? Literally just how? Since you were ten?Ten, Dominic? And all this bullshit about howIrejectedyouand brokeyourheart? Did we go to the same fucking high school? The only reasonI hired that stupid sad clown to show up at your game wearing your stupid hoodie—the only reason I had him wipe his stupid sad clown tears with your letter—was because Iknew, dumbass. Rachel told me it was a prank, and you can be as pissy as you want about the fact that I managed to flip the tables and humiliateyouinstead of?—”

“Wait, wait, hold on.” His palm was up, a spark of something other than sheer exhaustion and regret flashing across his eyes. A sign of life. “Back up. Repeat what you just said.”

I licked my lips, my lungs working overtime. “What, the clown? Yeah, I’m still not sorry. Tit for tat. You wanted them to laugh at me, and I beat you to it.” It would have been well worth the suspension had Dominic ratted me out when the teachers got involved and started asking questions.

For the first time in his high school career, he’d been the butt of the joke. And it’d been a big enough blow that he’d stormedoff the field, but only after ripping his letter out of Sad Clown’s hands.

“No. The other thing.” He stepped forward. “You referred to a prank. What prank?”

My eyes rolled hard enough to strain muscles I didn’t know they were connected to.

Theonlyreason I decided to humor him was because I couldn’t go on a rant about our lack of communication, then scoff when he asked questions. No matter how badly said question warranted the aforementioned scoff. “The one where you left your hoodie and a handwritten love letter in my locker, hoping to bait me into showing up to the game, only so you could humiliate me by kissing Harper instead.”

Though she hadn’t been wearing it at the game.

Otherwise, word would have spread.

My theory? He hadn’t wanted me catching wind of the plan, so she’d been instructed to pull it out closer to the end of the match. While I was distracted or something.

Dominic was staring at me with his mouth open, entirely dumbstruck, as though I’d switched to speaking in hieroglyphics midsentence. “You’re joking.”

“My jokes are funny. This is not. Ergo de facto, you’re a shithead, and you’re going to have to explain,very clearly, how you go fromthatto everything you said to me last night. Because it’s not adding up for me.”

The sudden dry laugh that burst out of him ended just as abruptly as it started. He straightened. Bent forward. Frowned. “Alice, this isn’t funny. Tell me?—”

“Dominic, I swear to god, if you accuse me of lying right now, it’s going to end in, like, seven different life sentences between the two of us and a urinal planted on your early grave. I’m not joking.”