Joel shudders against me, his fingers gripping tighter around my thighs and his hard body pinning me to the wall. I kiss away the sounds coming from his parted lips while he empties inside me, and afterward, his head drops to my shoulder and he slowly sets my heels back to the tile. My arms are still around him, and I don’t want to let him go, but then he lifts his head and stares into me with bloodshot eyes and tear-stained cheeks. His voice is raw with an emotion I feel in my own bones. “I can’t do this anymore.”
When his blurred form turns away from me, I don’t stop him.
When he walks out the door, he doesn’t look back.
Chapter Twenty-Four
AFTER JOEL WALKED away from me, I wanted to fall to my knees. I wanted to collapse and cry until I had no tears left to shed.
Instead, I ran after him.
It took a few seconds for my feet to move, but eventually, something clicked in my brain. A desperate voice said, this is your last chance, and I took it. I swung open the door, I pushed through the crowd, I searched for him. And I froze.
He was leaving—with her. My gaze lowered to their joined hands, and I stared at them until they were burned into my brain. Then, the hands disappeared, and I knew with crushing certainty that my chance with Joel was gone. The chance had passed two weeks earlier in an empty pool, and now it was too late.
I left Mayhem as soon as I was sure Joel wouldn’t still be in the parking lot. In my car, I texted Rowan to tell her I had changed my mind about telling him how I felt. I asked her to give Leti a ride home, and I also asked, very politely, for her to please give me my space.
She showed up at my apartment half an hour later, but by then, I was already numb. It was easy to tell her that I had simply decided I didn’t want to be tied down, that I was sure Joel wouldn’t want to be tied down either. She argued with me and repeatedly asked me if something had happened, but I had no intention of ever telling her about what happened in the bathroom.
Gradually, days turned into weeks and she let it go.
I thought of Joel every day, every night, but I eventually stopped crying about him. He never texted, never called, and neither did I. I avoided Mayhem, and even though I still got asked out on dates almost anytime I bothered brushing my hair and going out in public, I turned them all down. Instead, I focused all my energy on finishing my classes and making T-shirts for The Last Ones to Know.
THE WEEK BEFORE finals, Rowan drags me to IHOP and I let her because I’ve come to a decision she needs to know about sooner rather than later. We sit in a booth, we place our orders, and we’re both carving into high stacks of strawberry pancakes when she says, “How do you think you’re going to do on your finals next week?”
“Honestly?” She waits expectantly, and I give it to her straight. “I’m not even going to bother taking two of them because there’s no way I can pass the classes even if I ace the finals.” Her lips part like she’s going to say something, but I don’t leave her time to interrupt. “Two others are papers, and I’ve already started working on them, but I’ll be lucky if I pass the classes with Cs. The other one is the marketing class, and I better get an A on that one or I’m seriously going to burn the entire school to the ground.”
Rowan’s worry lines are deep when she says, “You really can’t pass two of them even if you ace the finals?”
“Don’t look at me like that,” I say. “I tried, Ro. I really did. I mean, you saw me, I—”
“I know you did,” she assures me. “You’ve been working really hard . . .”
I take a deep, heavy breath. “I promised my dad I’d get my grades up . . . but the damage was already done before midterms. I couldn’t get caught up, and then . . . stuff happened.” I don’t need to say what stuff. I stopped saying Joel’s name a few weeks ago. “It just wasn’t going to happen.”
“There’s always next semester,” she suggests after a while, forcing a smile at me even though her eyes are still sad.
I take another weighted breath, knowing I have to tell her and hoping I don’t cry. “Ro . . . I’m not coming back next semester.”
She stops cutting into her pancakes to stare at me. “What do you mean?”
“I’m going home. I’m not coming back. I—”
“You’re not coming back?”
My eyes start to sting, so I close them. “I just can’t be here anymore. This isn’t working out for me.”
When she slides into my side of the booth, I open my eyes and look at her. She takes my hand. “Dee, I know you miss Joel, but—”
“This isn’t just about Joel,” I say, and it’s the truth. The past few weeks have been some of the most miserable of my life, but while part of my brain insists that it’s all because of a certain boy I can’t forget, the other part knows that’s not entirely true. It’s also because I’ve honestly been giving college my all, and the more seriously I take it, the more wrong it feels, like I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing or in the place where I should be. Over the past year, I’ve tried to quiet the voice, convincing myself that it’s just because I’m lazy or disinterested—because everyone with half a brain goes to college, right?—but it’s gotten to the point where I no longer care what the voice says because I just want to go home.
I want to go back to a place where subjects like math and biology don’t matter. Back where homework doesn’t exist and boys are predictable. Back where I can figure out who I am, because right now, the only thing I’m absolutely sure of is who I’m not. I’m not the same girl who accepted that college was her only option. I’m not the same girl who obsessed over Joel, or who let Aiden drool all over her, or who thought she could use Cody as a pawn to get what she wanted.