“I’m here to talk sense into you.”
“And what kind of sense is that?” I’m practically growling as I struggle to get comfortable against the trunk of a thick-barked tree. That rock I slept on seriously might have poked a hole in something vital, because all of my muscles feel battered and bruised—maybe from the rock, or maybe from the way my body racked with heartbreaking sobs as I cried myself to sleep on top of it.
Leti runs his hand through the sunlit hair on top of his head. “Where should we even start? Kale or Shawn?” When my expression hardens on his last word, he nods to himself and says, “Kale it is. You’re mad at him for telling Shawn to stay away from you in high school, right?”
I stare back at him, refusing to answer such an idiotic question.
“You realize you were fifteen, right? And Shawn was eighteen? An eighteen-year-old hot musician who’d slept with more girls than most guys twice his age? And you were a virgin? And he was moving away anyway? And you had an unhealthy obsession with him?”
I cut in when he gets to the only part I can argue with. “I was not obsessed.”
“Love, obsession . . . ” Leti flicks his fingers in the air. “When you’re fifteen, it’s all the same thing. What do you think would have happened if Kale hadn’t told Shawn not to call you? Do you really think he would have called?”
“I’ll never know,” I answer angrily.
“Okay, let me ask you this then. Do you really think Shawn—Shawn—would have stayed away from you just because your macho-man brothers wanted him to? If he really wanted to be with you, like your little-girl heart wanted to believe, do you think he would have let them stand in his way? For six years?”
A sharp stinging surges against the back of my eyes, and I blame it on the even-worse stinging in my chest. It feels like my heart is a twisted, gnarled mess, like it’s been thrown into a food processer and then run over with a Mac truck. “I get it, Leti. Shawn never wanted me. Is that your point?”
“My point is that Kale was just trying to protect you. He’s an idiot, but he’s an idiot who loves you.”
“Lucky me.”
Leti sighs and watches me wipe the heel of my palm over my eye. “You are lucky. Extremely lucky. Which brings us to Shawn.”
“If you say I’m lucky to have Shawn,” I warn, “you’re getting a rock chucked at your head.”
“Baby steps, she-devil,” Leti replies, like I didn’t just threaten to murder him where no one would find his body. “I’m not going to tell you Shawn cares about you or anything.” He fakes a cough that sounds an awful lot like, “He does,” and then he wipes a self-satisfied grin from his face and continues. “But I am going to point out that you are a giant—and I’m talking giant, massive, enormous, colossal—”
“Get to the fucking point,” I order.
“Hypocrite.” Leti matches my hard stare with one of his own, not backing down from the darkness in my eyes or fearing the way I weigh that promised rock in my palm. “All you’ve done since the moment you walked back into Shawn’s life is lie.”
“I’m not the liar,” I argue, letting the rock fall back to the ground.
“Yes, you are.”
“But he—”
“Did exactly the same thing as you.” In my silence, Leti emphasizes, “Exactly the same thing. You pretended not to know him. He pretended not to know you. How are you going to be mad at him for something you did?”
“I did it to protect myself,” I insist, but the argument sounds weak even to my own ears.
“And you just assume he did it for a different reason? Like just to hurt you or something? This is Shawn we’re talking about. Since when have you known him to go around trying to hurt people?”
Shawn puts honey in Adam’s whiskey before shows. He goes on coffee runs for the roadies. He brings earplugs for girls who steal them.
I feel my anger waning with the absolute sense Leti is making, so I narrow my eyes even farther and continue protesting. “He wanted to keep me a secret.”
“Did he tell you he wanted to keep you a secret?”
“YES!” I bark at him. “He told me not to tell anyone about us!”
“Forever?”
I want to scream at Leti again, but instead, I think back and remember what Shawn had said. He said that he didn’t want Adam and Joel to know because they’d make the rest of the tour hell. He looked down into my eyes and said, “Later. Just not yet.”
My molars ache when I stop grinding them together. “I think he wanted to wait until after the tour . . . ”
“And did you give him the chance to tell people after you guys got home?”
God, last night . . . Last night, my mom had asked him if he had a girlfriend, and he said he didn’t know. He looked right at me. In front of everyone. Like it was my decision. And after my outburst, he chased me. He chased me like I was the only thing he cared about.