me? Or is it possible that you’ve developed feelings for him in that cold heart of yours?”
The idea of Zac staying with Hannah after everything we’d shared the last few weeks made a cold sweat break out all over my body.
“You don’t love him,” I told her.
Hannah shrugged. “Love is negotiable. I can play the part of the adoring girlfriend, if that’s what it takes to ensure that I come out on top in the end.”
I licked my dry lips as the cold panic seeped into my bones. “It’s not fair to him. If you don’t want him, break up with him and let him find someone else.”
“Such as you?” She raised one eyebrow at me, amusement etched into her smile. “If I didn’t know better, Avery, I’d think maybe you had fallen in love with Zac Greeley. But that’s ridiculous, of course. You’ve never loved anyone except yourself.” She picked up her books, propping them on her hip. “Don’t tell me you honestly thought maybe you and Zac had something real. I paid you to spend time with him and the only reason he’s spent time with you, other than for your business project, is because he feels sorry for you.”
I took a step back, my mouth open as I tried to form words.
“He told me himself,” she went on. “He thinks you’re a lonely, miserable person who is too afraid to let people get close. He pities you.”
Nausea welled up inside me, rising in my throat. I didn’t want to believe that Zac would say those words.
But hadn’t he already said them to me? He’d told me—more than once—that I needed a date, I needed to loosen up, I needed to stop hiding from everyone. The truth was Zac had already told me what he thought of me, and it wasn’t something good.
I stumbled backward away from Hannah’s table as she continued staring at me with a gleeful look in her eye. She knew she had me. She could see that underneath the walls of a perfect life I had built, I was crumbling into nothing. Everything I had worked so hard for was falling to pieces. Because of Zac. Because of a guy who thought everything was a joke and had the nerve to pity me.
I spotted him at his locker when I left the library. Papers spilled from the door, fluttering the floor around his duct-taped shoes. He bent over, attempting to shove his math book into the mess inside his dirty backpack.
He pitied me?
My heart pounded an erratic rhythm in my ears as I forced my feet forward, closing the distance between us. My vision darkened around the edges until all I could see was him, this pathetic, disorganized class clown who had come into my life and ruined everything. My chest felt tight and I gasped for air.
He looked up as I drew closer. His lips stretched into a nervous smile. “Hey,” he said.
“Hannah is cheating on you,” I said before I could change my mind.
Zac’s backpack hung limply at his side. “What?”
“I have pictures of her with another guy,” I said. My voice sounded loud in the empty hallway, almost as if I were shouting. “She wants you to break up with her so that she can look like the victim. She paid me to flirt with you and get you to fall for me so you’ll dump her.”
Zac’s face paled.
“You were paid to spend time with me?” His voice was quiet, barely above a whisper, but it sounded like a shout in the silent room.
The pressure in my chest tightened when I saw the hurt in his eyes. I wished I could take the words back, erase them from his memory.
“Zac,” I began, swallowing a lump that had formed in the back of my throat. “It’s not like that—”
“What is it like then?” When I didn’t answer, he said in a choked voice, “Could you please explain to me what’s going on?”
He looked hurt and angry and afraid. He looked so small surrounded by the row of lockers behind him.
So I told Zac everything. The break up plot. The money. The fact that Hannah was seeing another guy.
The fact that I had, somewhere along the way, fallen in love with him. I hadn’t realized just how true that was until now.
I didn’t know what I expected when I was done. Maybe that he’d become so engulfed in fury he’d kick or throw something. Or he’d yell.
I expected Zac to do anything other