Look - Zan Romanoff Page 0,47
I’m here for a minute?”
Owen doesn’t respond.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry that you had to see that again, and I’m sorry that it happened, and I’m just—I’m still so sorry, O. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. I feel like I could say it forever, and it still wouldn’t change anything, or take back what I did, and I know that, so—”
“You shouldn’t be sorry,” Owen says. “I know it was an accident.”
“That doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt you.”
“I never liked it,” Owen says. “I never wanted you to do that. I should have told you the first time you asked. I just—I don’t know. It seemed like the kind of thing I was supposed to be into. And you seemed so sure that it was a good idea.”
Lulu slides down the far wall so that she’s sitting facing him. The room is surprisingly echoey, their voices tumbling around and coming back to them, little faint whispers of their conversation haunting the air.
“I didn’t want to lose you,” she says. “I was trying so hard to figure out how to make us keep working.”
“Because you knew that we weren’t.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You thought.”
Lulu takes a deep breath. “I did,” she admits. “I thought. And I thought I could fix it too.”
“I still don’t understand how you thought that was gonna fix it. You kissing other people.”
“They were just—” Lulu stops herself.
“What? They were just what?”
“Just girls.”
Owen laughs. The sound is hollow and hurt. “C’mon, Lulu.”
“I thought you would think that,” she says. “That they were just girls.” She thinks of the way Ryan talked about her and Cass experimenting together. She gave him shit, but isn’t that exactly what she was telling herself? That it was all just silly, and fun, and it really didn’t matter? “I guess I kind of wanted to think they were just girls too. I lied to both of us, if it helps.”
“Watching you kiss her,” Owen says. “Sloane. I thought, It’s been a while since Lulu kissed me like that.”
“I didn’t want to lose you,” Lulu repeats. “And I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“No,” Owen says. “You definitely wanted to keep me. But you also didn’t want to be with me anymore, not really. You just already knew how we worked. I was the safe choice, and everything else was scary.”
It makes a horrible kind of sense. Lulu never let herself wonder if she’d stopped wanting Owen—she was too busy wondering if he’d stopped wanting her. And so it was easy to not even think about whether she actually wanted to kiss girls, or if she just wanted to kiss other people, period.
In that moment, Sloane seemed like a way of having both at once. But, in fact, she was doing the thing people always accuse girls like her of doing: being greedy. It wasn’t greedy to want boys sometimes, and girls sometimes. But to hang on to a person just to keep them, to try to have Owen and also someone else—anyone else—that was the thing she did wrong.
Lulu looks down at her body—her hands in her lap, the lines of her legs. She wonders if it will ever stop surprising or betraying her.
“I did love you,” Lulu says. She sounds as helpless as she feels.
“I do love you,” he says. This is the worst, best thing about Owen. He’s so smart, and he’s so brave, and he’ll just say things. True things. Important things. “But it’s a good thing for both of us that we’re over.”
Lulu feels something leave her. It’s effortless, like a wave rushing away from the shoreline. She’s been clutching at the edges of her old life like if she clung hard enough she might get to keep it. As if everything hadn’t already changed. As if she really would have wanted it back if she could have it.
And now, just like that, she understands: It’s gone. It’s been gone.
And now she’s nothing but scared. She has no idea what happens next.
“I love you,” she says. “I still love you.”
Owen comes to sit next to her. When he wraps an arm around her, she turns into his embrace and lets him hold her.
It’s not until she’s done crying, and raises her head to see the wet spot that she’s made on his T-shirt, that it occurs to her that it was sort of a gross thing for her to do.
Owen is the first person she’s ever been unself-consciously gross around. Sometimes it still feels like he’ll be