do for a living. I don’t care about anything other than getting out of this apartment and forgetting this night ever happened.”
“Again, not something a girl has ever told me.”
“Would you stop already?” I can’t keep my voice calm any longer. It thunders out of me without permission. “Stop doing that.”
“What?” His eyes droop at the sides like a puppy dog.
“Stop trying to charm me when I’m obviously furious with you.” My hands plant firmly on my hips, my nails digging into the bone that protrudes there.
“Is it working? The charming?”
I purse my lips bitterly. “Not in the least.”
“Why do you hate me so much?”
I throw him an incredulous glare. “Are you serious? Because you make me extremely angry, Ran.”
He’s still sitting on his bed, his legs crossed one over the other, and I’m glad he is because it allows me to tower over him. I wonder if that’s his intent. To let me feel like I have the upper hand for once.
“I don’t think that’s true, Maggie.” His hands are clasped at his ankles and a dark lock of hair slips onto his forehead as he slightly tosses his head to the side. “I think I make you think about the things in your life that make you angry. There’s a difference.”
“You make me angry, you make me think angry things. Whatever.”
“So the anger you have over your mom leaving your family,” he begins, and my mouth gapes open at his audacity. “Has no one ever challenged you to look at what it’s doing to you?”
“We’re not having this conversation. You don’t get to know me, Ran. You don’t get to ride in on your white horse and pretend to be the hero.”
“I believe it was a white ambulance, but—” he interjects.
I talk over him loudly. “You don’t get to pretend to have this deeper sort of relationship with me because you may or may not have saved my life. I don’t owe you anything.”
“You’re absolutely right. You don’t owe me a thing. I was doing my job. It was a matter of being at the right place at the right time.”
“Well, I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time right now and want to leave.”
“That’s what you think? Really? That you and I…” he waves his hands back and forth in the empty space between us, “… that this is all wrong?”
“There is no ‘you and I.’ ” I make childish air quotes around my words. “You and I have nothing in common, Ran.”
Unfortunately, the time for his courteous sitting-while-I’m-standing-act is over and he rises to his feet and takes three steps toward me. My eyes are level with his chest and he has to lower his face so I won’t need to crane mine up to look at him. It’s not something he needs to do, because I don’t plan on making eye contact. Instead, I stare straight into the inked design on his shirt.
“Maggie, we’re practically the same person.” I feel his eyes attempting to draw my gaze up to him, but I won’t surrender. “I think I get you.”
“Now that is the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said. Forget the lame attempts at charming me. You’re a certified psycho with that last one.”
My breathing becomes labored, like each individual pull of oxygen that enters my lungs is pushed back out into the world in the form of burning anger. “And driving a motorcycle because my daddy who didn’t want me drove one just screams ‘I’m a completely whole person,’ Ran.”
I had promised myself I wouldn’t, but when I give in and look up at his face, I wish I had been further up against the wall and not standing out in the open of the room, because my legs try to give out on me completely.
Ran’s mouth straightens and he tucks in his bottom lip as though he’s biting back something terrible. Something that will put me in the horrible place I deserve. I wait for it—wait for him to yell, wait for him to launch into all the reasons why I deserve to be miserable—but it doesn’t come.
The seconds of silence pulse around us and my ears flood with my own beating heart.
“I think you should go, Maggie.”
The quiver in my bottom lip takes everything in me to get under control, and I do that same lip biting he did to keep it from trembling. Unfortunately, I can’t find anything appropriate to do with the entire rest of my body that