That’s what always gets me in romance novels: when the love interest reveals a tragic past, or the reason he’s never home on Friday nights isn’t because he’s cheating—it’s because he’s playing bridge with his sick grandmother. When someone displays that kind of softness, I can’t help wanting to know more. I want them to open up, and I want it to be to me.
If this were a romance novel, he’d confess he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about me since our breakup. That it was the worst decision of his life, and he’s been thrown overboard in a sea of regret without a life jacket. Somehow, I get the feeling that’s not what’s about to happen. Spencer is not that eloquent.
“Then say it.”
He sips his coffee, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Do you remember our first date?”
The question throws me.
“Yes,” I say quietly, my heart betraying me in my chest, because of course I remember.
We’d been flirting in AP Government for months, to the point where romance-novel heroes had started to take his face. Like most modern relationships, it started over social media. Your color-coded study guides are so cute, he typed, and I responded, So are you. It was easier to be brave when you couldn’t see someone’s face.
Then he asked if I was free on Saturday. It was October, so we went to a pumpkin patch, got lost in a corn maze, and sipped hot chocolate from the same cup. After dinner at a restaurant so nice it had a dress code, we made out in his car. I felt drunk on him, drunk on the way he ran his hands down my body and kissed the tip of my nose. It was more than the omg a boy likes me relationships from earlier in high school. This felt serious. Adult. Like something out of one of my books.
It felt like he could love me.
My face must be turning red because I’m suddenly warm all over.
Evidently, the memory doesn’t trigger the same response in him. He’s still calm, collected. “Okay. Do you remember our second date? Third? Seventh?”
“I mean, no, but I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”
“Exactly. I think you want the entire relationship to be like that first date.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I say, but he holds up a finger to indicate he’s not finished. I slump back in my seat, fully aware I could do it now. Grab the bandanna and shut him up.
“I could tell you were disappointed when we just hung out and did homework or watched a movie. I felt this weird expectation with you. Like I was never going to measure up to the guys in your books.”
Of all the regrets I have about Spencer, at the top of the list is that I told him about my reading preferences. He took it better than most, but in retrospect, maybe it was because he just wanted to sleep with me.
“I wasn’t disappointed,” I say, but I’m not sure I trust my memory. “It felt like you just… stopped caring.”
It was more than that, though. It was how I wanted to hold hands in public and he’d keep his in his pockets. It was how I wanted to lean my head on his shoulder in a movie theater and he’d wiggle his shoulder until I moved. I tried to get close, but he kept pushing.
I planned romantic dates too: ice-skating, a picnic, a boat ride. Most of the time, he stared at his phone so much that I wondered if I really was that uninteresting.
“Maybe I did,” he admits. “It started to feel like an obligation, I guess. Okay, that sounds bad, but… high school relationships aren’t really meant to last.”
It’s clear now that Spencer and I were never going to have a happily-ever-after. The best parts of our relationship happened in a bed when our parents weren’t home, and maybe that’s okay. It’s okay that he wasn’t the perfect boyfriend.
What’s not okay is that he’s still sitting here, making me doubt something that’s never let me down.
“I’m sorry our relationship was such a terrible seven months for you.”
“That’s not what I meant.” He grimaces, staring down at his coffee cup. “Rowan…” Then he does something perplexing: he stretches his hand across the table as though he wants me to hold it. When it becomes clear that I won’t, he draws it back.
I think about Kirby and Mara. Their hand squeezes never seem compulsory. My parents, too—they still have major heart eyes for each other after twenty-five years.
“Look, I’m not sure what you wanted from this, but if your goal was to make me feel like shit, congratulations?”
It felt like an obligation. You felt like an obligation is how my mind warps it. I want so badly to be stronger than this. Luke and I even signed each other’s yearbooks. But Spencer has never not been complicated, and maybe it’s because I’m the complicated one.
Maybe I’m too difficult to love.
With a sigh, he scrubs a hand through his hair. “I’m just trying to explain what happened, at least on my side. You want this idealized romance, and I don’t think that’s real life. I’m pretty sure all relationships get boring after a while.”
It’s in that moment that pity is the overwhelming thing I feel. I feel sorry for this troglodyte because he has no idea that love doesn’t have to sour over time. I don’t need to be whisked away in a horse-drawn carriage, and I fully believe both partners are responsible for making a relationship romantic, if that’s what they want. Not whatever heteronormative bullshit that tells us guys are supposed to make the first move and pay for dinner and get down on one knee.
But I do want something big and wild, something that fills my heart completely. I want a fraction of what Emma and Charlie or Lindley and Josef or Trisha and Rose have, even though they’re fictional. I’m convinced that when you’re with the right person, every date, every day feels that way.
“I’m gonna go,” he says, getting up and turning away from the table.
“Spencer?”
He glances back at me, and with a sweet smile, I dive forward to yank off his armband.
1:33 p.m.
I’M STILL BUZZING with Howl adrenaline by the time I hop a bus heading down Third Avenue. It wasn’t until Spencer grumbled about being out of the game so early and surrendered his target (Madison Winters, who wrote a lot of stories about shape-shifting foxes in my creative writing class—one or two, fine, but seven?) that it hit me, zipping through my veins like some wild drug. If it feels this good to kill Spencer, I can only imagine how it’ll feel to beat McNair.
After Spencer left, I sent the juniors a photo of my coffee cup, was rewarded with a green check-mark emoji almost instantaneously, and then scrutinized the list of clues. The ones referring to specific landmarks stood out right away—the big guy at the center of the universe has to be the Fremont Troll, a statue under the Aurora Bridge in a neighborhood nicknamed the “Center of the Universe.”
It makes the most sense to get what I can downtown before going north. Pike Place Market is only a few bus stops away, not worth giving up my parking spot. It’s probably one of the top three things people associate with Seattle, with the Space Needle being number one and Amazon-Microsoft-Boeing-Starbucks being a combined number two. It’s one of the country’s oldest year-round farmers markets, but it’s also a living, breathing piece of Seattle history. And it’s always packed with tourists, even on rainy days.