Page 55 of Hostile

“You think I made that video,” he said.

Not a question. Just a fact, stated quietly, as if something were being set down with care.

“Then why did you say it?” My voice came out very quietly. “Why did you say that’s not me and just stand there and let me run?”

Something crossed his face I couldn’t name. “Because Blair was standing six feet away, and I was nineteen years old and didn’t yet understand what she’d done, and I thought—” He stopped. Swallowed. “I thought if I denied sending it loudly enough, in front of Billy and his crowd, it would somehow—” He closed his eyes briefly. “It was the worst decision of my life. I know that. I’ve known it for ten years. But I swear to you I did not send that text.”

I stood in the rain while ten years of certainty began to fracture.

That's not me.

For ten years, I'd thought he'd meant that's not me in that video.

Not me touching her. Not me loving her. Not me choosing her. Not me making promises I never intended to keep.

But that wasn't what he'd said at all.

He hadn't been looking at the video. He'd been looking at the text attached to it.

“That's not me” had meant “I didn't send that.”

Not “I wasn't in that video with her.”

Not “I don't know who she is.”

Not the rejection I'd carried for ten years. Not the public humiliation of being erased by the same boy who had said I love you so many times that it had stopped feeling like words.

He hadn't denied me. He'd denied sending the video. And in the worst moment of my life, I'd heard something else entirely.

Ten years. I had built ten years on a misunderstanding spoken in four words in a hallway, while Blair Aldridge stood six feet away, watching it detonate exactly as she’d designed it to.

“You saw what it looked like,” he said quietly. “Not what it was.”

I looked at him.

At the devastation on his face, which was not the expression of a man constructing a defense. It was the expression of a man who had just understood the full weight of what someone had been carrying because of him. Because of a hallway. Because of four words spoken in front of the wrong people at the worst possible moment.

I read his thoughts in the expression of his eyes. She thinks I deliberately humiliated her. I watched him understand it, watched it move through him like a tide.

“You thought I did that to you,” he said, quietly, almost to himself. “You’ve thought that for ten years.”

I didn’t answer.

He looked at me for one more moment—at whatever was on my face, whatever I hadn’t managed to hide quickly enough—and then he looked away. He looked at the wet pavement, the building, and the city moving past in the rain, with the expression of a man who had just had something collapse inside him and was deciding whether to let it show.

He let it show.

“Megan.” His voice had gone rough at the edges. “I loved you. I need you to know that whatever you believe about that hallway, I loved you. I have never wanted to hurt you in my life. Not then. Not ever.”

My eyes acted in a way I had strictly prohibited. He noticed and looked at me. I then stepped back.

“I can’t do this tonight,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt, which was the last coherent thing my armor managed before the rest of it. “I need—I need to go.”

“Megan—”

I was already moving, already reaching for the professional distance I’d spent six weeks building, only to watch it dissolve in forty-five minutes over club soda and a walk in the rain. “I need to think.”

I hailed the first cab I saw and got in and sat back against the seat and watched the rain-blurred city stream past the windows and did not, for once, tell myself to get it together.