Something dawns on me. My mouth drops open. The last time we spoke, years ago, he told me some pretty vile things. He’d said to me that he couldn’t give a shit if I left town.
Of course, by then he was already back on his hamster wheel, screwing every girl he could get his hands on, as if the months we spent together had meant absolutely nothing to him. Every time I’d hear a rumor about Dax Harding and another girl, it was like a knife straight to my heart, but what made it worse was that he didn’t care at all what I was up to.
As hard as it was to leave my parents, to leave home, I’d had to do it. I’d been accepted to Lafayette and Lehigh and Scranton, all universities much closer, but I’d purposely chosen the one that would put as much distance between Dax and me as possible.
I can still remember the indifference on his face when I said goodbye to him.
“What are you, angry at me because I wanted to go away to make something of myself?” I say to him now, my blood boiling as I vividly recall just how badly he hurt me. It feels like a fresh wound again, scar tissue violently ripped open.
He stares at me. “What?”
His evil plan is all congealing inside my head. “I bet there’s nothing that wrong with my car,” I say, my voice growing louder. “Tell the truth.”
He pushes off the workbench, drops the wrench on the table, and grabs a dirty rag. “I’m pretty sure you’re the one who ended up stranded on the road, begging me to save you.”
I clench my fists. My blood is boiling over. He’s the only person on the face of the earth that can get me this riled up. “Okay, but I bet it’s not as bad as you’re saying. I bet it’s probably just a little fix. I need a second opinion.”
He sucks in a breath. “Then get one. And here I thought you were the smart one. You’re unbelievable, do you know that? I offer to fix Little Blue for free, out of the generosity of my heart, and you accuse me of—“
“Admit it. You’re just trying to make trouble for me.”
He throws the rag against wall and glares at me. “What? And why would I do that?”
“Because of how we ended things.”
“How we ended things?” He lets out a short laugh. “I got news for you, Katherine, but we didn’t end things and you damn well know it.”
I can pinpoint the day it all fell apart, a few months before the end of my junior year. We went together for five months, if it could be called that. Ninety-nine percent of the time it was just Dax and me, alone. We never could go out with his friends or mine, because they wouldn’t understand. Eventually, though, everyone found out and . . . everything just went haywire.
By the end of it all, he was expelled from school, my parents were notified of the incident, and it was like every single person in my life was not just begging, but demanding, that I forget him if I wanted to have any sort of future.
So I listened to them. I did what I had to do, because Dax had made it impossible to stay with him. He fought everything and everyone, and in the end he even fought me.
“I don’t want to get into who did what to who,” I sigh, throwing up my hands, as my mind fights for something to hold onto.
I can’t stand the thought of questioning whether I had hurt Dax first, if his reactions were all justified. That’s the kind of horrible mind games that he forces me to play.
That’s why I was trying to avoid all of this in the first place.
My whole body is getting hotter, and I’m not sure if it’s because there’s no air conditioning, because I’m angry as hell, or because I’m with Dax Harding. In our relationship, short as it was, we’d always have the most explosive fights. That clearly hasn’t changed. “Well obviously you don’t like us city people,” I tell him, regaining some of my composure. “You probably couldn’t wait for me to come back so that you could pull more shit on me.”
He vises his head in his hands, breathing hard. His eyes are pure fire. “What? Why would I pull shit on you?”
I nod, and thrust my chin up. “Because I’m probably the only girl in town you haven’t screwed, and you can’t stand to leave things unfinished.”
He turns away, so incensed he can’t bear to look at me. Then he whirls quickly toward me again, comes up close to me and wags a finger in my face. “You’re fucking unbelievable. Next time someone offers to do something nice for you, ‘thank you’ would work better.”
I narrow my eyes in disbelief. “Thank you? After what you did to me?”
“After what I did?” He opens his mouth to say more, twisting it in different shapes, but nothing comes out. He storms up close to me like he’s going to grab me and shake some sense into me, but stops with mere inches between us when I flinch.
His face softens, his muscles relax. His breathing is ragged and strained. His eyes scrape over me, as if discovering me for the first time. When his eyes lower to my chest, I am sure he can see my heart bursting out of it.