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Boone shook his head. “You wouldn’t owe me a thing. Consider it reparations for the way I treated you in the past. A gift.”
“No thanks.” That’s exactly how it had started with Kevin. Then the emotional blackmail began, and it only got worse from there.
“Good,” he said as he leaned forward.
Good? Now he was totally messing with me, offering me an out and then taking it back.
“Because I don’t want you to leave,” he added softly.
Now we had entered The Twilight Zone, if he suddenly wanted me to stay.
“I thought the worst of you,” he said. “And I was wrong.”
“You’re just now figuring that out?” As if that was a news flash.
“And I treated you poorly,” he added.
“Pfft.Poorlyis a gross understatement. You completely humiliated me. You ruined my life. Do you have any idea how mean the girls… Of course you wouldn’t understand. We had to move. I mean, out of state— Forget it. I’m done with that chapter of my life.”
“I’m very sorry about that, and I’ll understand if you don’t want to accept my apology. You can decide to leave tomorrow and be rid of me—of all of us. Or…” He took a deep breath. “Let me start by saying I’ve thought about you a lot since you got back, and I admit having wondered once or twice how it would have turned out between us if we hadn’t… Sorry. If I hadn’t broken us up.”
“Once or twice?” I asked, not wanting to admit to having the same question on my mind several times in the past.
“Honestly? More than that.”
“What are you saying, Boone?”
“I’d like to try again. If you’ll let me… I mean, if you want to.”
CHAPTER22
Angela
Try again?
Those words were an elixir to my ego. Early on after moving to Massachusetts, I’d had a recurring dream that Boone would show up one day at my new school and beg me to listen to him.
In my dream, he’d beg and beg, I’d tell him to come back tomorrow, that I didn’t have the time to listen to him that day.
He’d come back begging again.
I’d make him grovel to punish him for what I’d gone through. In Peterville, he’d had the power and used it to humiliate me. In my dream, I took the power and used it to destroy him when he wanted me back. Refusing him was the reverse of him dumping me, I thought. In the dream, bad karma would destroy him the way it had me, and balance would be restored to the universe.
“Do you remember Jared Lebow?” Boone asked, breaking me out of my history replay.
“I guess. Wasn’t he also on the team?”
“He was the second-string tight end behind me. When the arrest kept me from playing in the game against Hartford—the one the college scout attended—Jared got the scholarship that should have been mine.”
“Good break for him I guess.”
Boone nodded. “He got the scholarship and went on to be drafted by the Giants to play in the NFL.” He sighed. “All this time, I’d thought that was what you’d cost me—my chance at professional football.”
I’d known he missed the game just before he broke us up, but not what it had meant, or how he’d blamed me. Now it dawned on me how big an opportunity that would have been. “But I didn’t—”
“I get it.” He reached across and took my hand. “I had it wrong.”
His touch was as electric, as it had been all those years ago.
