make me wait. He comes over right at seven, holding takeout from Tibet Kitchen that smells so much more appealing than the pizza I’d ordered for us to share.
“Hey,” he says, and gives a little smile. He ducks, like he’s going to kiss my lips, but then makes a detour at the last second, landing on my cheek instead.
My heart drops.
I step back, letting him in, and it suddenly feels too warm in my apartment; everything seems too small. I look everywhere but at his face, because I know if I look at him and get the sense that things between us really aren’t okay, I’m not going to be able to keep myself together for the conversation we need to have.
It’s so weird. He follows me into the kitchen, we make up plates of food, and then we sit on the floor in the living room, on opposite sides of the coffee table, facing each other. The silence feels like a huge bubble around me. For the past week, Ethan has practically lived here. Now it feels like we’re strangers all over again.
He pokes at his rice. “You’ve barely looked at me since I got here.”
The response to this dries up in my throat: Because you kissed my cheek when you walked in. You didn’t pull me against you, or get lost in a long kiss with me. I feel like I barely had you, and now you’re already gone.
So instead of answering aloud, I look up at him for the first time and try to smile. He registers the failed effort, and it clearly makes him sad. An ache builds and expands in my throat until I’m honestly not sure I’ll be able to get words around it. I hate this somber dynamic more than I hate the fact that we’re fighting.
“This is so weird,” I say. “It would be so much easier to be snarky with each other.”
He nods, poking at his food. “I don’t have the energy to be snarky.”
“Me either.” I really just want to crawl across the floor and into his lap and have him tease me about my bra being too small or how I couldn’t stay away from him long enough to finish my dinner, but it’s like Dane and his fratty face are just parked here in between us, keeping us from being normal.
“I talked to Dane last night,” he says right then, adding, “late. I went over there late.”
Ami didn’t mention this. Did she even know that Ethan stopped by last night?
“And?” I say quietly. I have no appetite and basically just push a piece of beef around the plate.
“He was really surprised that that’s how you took what he said,” Ethan says.
Acid fills my stomach. “What a shock.”
Ethan drops his fork and leans back on both hands, staring at me. “Look, what am I supposed to do? My girlfriend thinks my brother hit on her, and he says he didn’t. Does it matter who is right here? You’re both offended.”
At this, I am incredulous. “You’re supposed to believe me. And it absolutely matters who’s right here.”
“Olive, we’ve been together for like two weeks,” he says helplessly.
It takes a few seconds for me to be able to unscramble the pile of words that falls into my thoughts. “I’m lying because our relationship is new?”
Sighing, he reaches up, wiping one hand over his face.
“Ethan,” I say quietly, “I know what I heard. He propositioned me. I can’t just pretend like he didn’t.”
“I just don’t think he meant what you thought he did. I think you’re primed to think the worst of him.”
I blink back down to my plate. It would be so easy to choose to make peace with Ethan and Ami and just say, “You know what? You’re probably right,” and just let it be, because after all this, of course I’m primed to think the worst of Dane, and I could easily give him a wide berth for the rest of time. But I can’t do that. There are too many red flags—why am I the only one who can see them? It’s not because I am a pessimist or look for the worst in people; I know that isn’t true about me, not anymore. I fell for Ethan on that island, after all. I’m excited about a job at Camelia so that I have time to really think about what I want my life to look like. I’m trying to fix all the parts of me that aren’t