“Whoa,” Natalie says, peeking over my shoulder. “Okay, I take it back. I have never seen Spencer look like that. Is he actually smiling?”
“Is this from your sister’s wedding?” Rylie asks.
I nod, not trusting myself to speak. Because the affection I’d felt before, it all drains away. Replaced with cold, hard anger.
Brigid sent me this photo. I never saw it.
Because someone saw it before me. Received the message and deleted it, leaving me completely in the dark about its existence.
I slap my laptop shut. Grab my phone and check my social media apps. And when I see his latest photo, of him holding up a glass stein of beer with his buddies, I shout, “That asshole!”
41
Spencer
I miss my shot, and tighten my fists around my pool cue as Rowe wins our game.
“Done yet?” he asks.
I grab a twenty from my pocket. Smack it on top of the pile of similar bills on the stool holding my beer. “Not even close.”
Gray shrugs, then racks the balls, just as Morris and Hart step up to our game. Morris taps my full beer bottle.
“I’m sober,” I tell him. I’d had one swig and couldn’t bring myself to finish the rest.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Didn’t have to, you dick.”
He grins, then adds his own cash to the pot to face whoever wins. Which, in an embarrassingly short amount of time, is Rowe again, muttering to himself as he arranges delicate fucking geometry angles with each shot. Morris takes my cue, his laughter coming fast and easy in the week since his dad left campus.
I take an empty stool next to Hart, who, unlike me, has been drinking tonight. Drinking and staring at his phone for updates from Stone.
Finally, I do drink, the taste sour in my mouth when I remember why his girlfriend’s not with us. Why I haven’t seen her or Natalie all week. Because they’re with Kennedy. I also haven’t seen her since last Saturday. I only know she didn’t die from another anaphylactic attack because of Hart. He’d walked me home after the fundraiser. Sat next to me on Main Desire’s front porch steps in silence until Rylie texted him Kennedy was fine and returning home.
And then he’d asked me, “How hard did she punch you, Spence?”
To which, I’d responded by burying my head in my hands, and all that shit in my mind—Kennedy’s inability to picture a future with me, my frustration and insecurity over seeing her ex, my shame at the trouble caused by my ex, the hope I felt when she told me her feelings, dashed to pieces when the first words out of my mouth hadn’t been to say them back, guilt at not saving her from something as stupidly innocent as a balloon, agony at seeing her fight so hard for air, relief that she would be okay, all my memories of her, all the secrets and feelings and everything I wanted out in the open—I let it all go.
Ask Hart, and he’ll say he saw one manly tear. Just the one.
Now, he fidgets with his beer. I ask him, “What?”
“Oh, nothing,” he says. Flippantly shrugs one shoulder. “Just, Morris and I were talking about it at the bar. We thought you hated her.”
I grunt. That hadn’t been hate. Major dislike? Sure. But never hate. I hadn’t known Kennedy then. Hadn’t understood what makes her her.
Now I know. And I’m an even bigger fucking idiot than I was then.
“Is that why you punched Keeland last fall? Because you liked her?”
“I punched Keeland because he’s a piece of shit.”
“And?”
…And maybe because I thought his hot girlfriend was too good for him. Too good for me, now.
Hart grins when I grunt again, not meeting his eyes. “I knew it.”
“Knew what?” Rowe asks, perking up like we have some tidbit of knowledge he, shockingly, does not know.
“Spence and Kennedy,” Hart teases.
Morris waves him off to focus on the pool game. “We all knew something about that.”
“How did you know?” I ask. Because other than mine and Hart’s moment outside our house, none of them had acknowledged that Kennedy and I had been together, right under their noses, for so long. They’d taken it in stride, not one of them scandalized by the truth coming out.
“Rylie told me,” Hart says. He crosses his fingers. “Me and my girl? We’re tight. No secrets. Also, Natalie blabbed. Pretty sure she told Morris, too. Right?”
Morris nods, brow furrowing when Gray shoots a striped ball past him.
“Yeah, you can’t trust Mason. Girl’s a snitch,” Hart laughs. He tips his beer to our glasses-wearing roommate. “Sorry, Gray, you’re last to know.”
“I knew.”
Rowe says it so matter-of-factly, we all look at him. He lines up his last shot, making us wait as he defeats Morris. Then, he takes a long draw from his stein, torturing us even more, since he knows he has an audience. When he finishes the last drop, he sets it on the stool with his winnings and declares, “This may come as a surprise to you idiots—and really, it shouldn’t—but I was the first to know.”
“How?” Hart asks, and I grunt something similar.
Gray begins counting off his fingers. “Other than the conspicuous facts—Kennedy stopped dating; you started staying home more—your swearing went down by five percent. Kennedy’s went up by fifteen. Your vocabulary finally reached a college freshman reading level. You used the word ‘anomaly’ while telling me how to load the dishwasher, as well as ‘scintillating’—albeit sarcastically—when Levi told you a dirty joke. You were sixty-two percent more likely to stay awake during biology, and seventy-three percent less likely to ask to borrow my notes. Your coffee consumption tripled, and you always came back from Busy Beans after one of Kennedy’s shifts. By my calculations, mid-February’s when it started.”
“And, if you don’t want all the numbers—Which you should, because the slide presentation I made is quite fascinating—” Morris clears his throat to get Rowe
