B00AAOCX2E EBOK (38 page)

My mouth dropped to the bedspread.

“I told you,” Chelsea beamed.

“Shhh!” Forgetting my wet toes, I scrambled off the bed and crouched down before the stereo.

“Well, that didn’t happen. Not only did my attraction for her continue to grow, but the jealousy kept getting stronger and stronger. One night when we were here in the station, her phone rang while she was out of the room, and I answered it. It was a guy she’d been waiting to hear from, and I didn’t tell her. I didn’t want to tell her, because, for the first time, there was some indication that she was looking at me a little differently. This battle was going on inside me; I didn’t want things to change, but I was being drawn to her.

“I caught her checking me out when I was lying in bed a few days later. And later that same day, she made some flirtatious jokes. I should have been excited. Instead, I was pissed. Which is really stupid, if you think about it, but it would mean I was getting what I wanted, and I never get what I want. Things just don’t work out that way for me.”
His voice had dropped, almost as if he thought he was talking in his head not to anyone who could fiddle with a radio dial.

Chelsea ran out when the phone rang, but immediately returned with it glued to her ear. “Yeah, she’s listening right now. Um… I can’t tell.”

“Shhh-shhh-
SHHH
!” I waved her out of the room. She returned to my side a few moments later, sans phone.

“I was such a dick to her after that. We had to do a panel for some class, and… God, I was as obnoxious as I could be. Someone asked what to do when you fall in love with your best friend, and I gave a general answer, wanting to sweep it under the rug because I didn’t have any answers. That wasn’t good enough for her. She gave an even better one, telling the person asking the question that she should take the risks. I thought about the risks the rest of the day, weighing the pros and cons, and I decided to take her advice and ask her out.”

“Why is he doing this?”

Chelsea eyes were full of excitement. “I told him he’d have to do something big to get your attention, but I never, in a million years, thought he’d do
this
.”

“Oh, he’s got my attention,” I growled, my fingernails biting into my palms. “How dare he!”

“How dare he?” She looked shocked. “Slow down, Ivy. Don’t you get it? He’s telling everyone he loves you. It’s his big gesture – and a public mea culpa, to boot! It’s about the most romantic thing I think anybody has ever done.”

“Chelsea, there’s nothing romantic about this. He’s talking about our private lives on the air! I’m going to have to move out of the country just to live this humiliation down.”

Chelsea rolled her eyes. “Don’t be such a drama queen. He’s telling his side of the story. He’s ripping down that barrier, making himself vulnerable to get your attention. If anything, everyone is going to know more about him than you, but that’s a risk he’s willing to take. For you.”

I stared at her. She wasn’t wrong. This was a huge personal risk on Ian’s part. He was such a private person and he was opening himself up. This was monumental.

“…when I finally did get up the nerve, I found out I was too late. She’d already agreed to go out with someone else. On a blind date, of all things, which was a low blow. Maybe if I had come right out and used the word ‘date’, instead of asking her to hang out, she would have changed her mind, but I didn’t, because I’m a pussy, and I feared rejected. Yeah, newsflash, people: I may talk a good game, but I’m really insecure and I second-guess myself all the time.”

“How did you even hear about this? Since when do you listen to Ian’s show?”

“Since two minutes ago. Amery called me. She knew you’d never listen if she called you, so she told me to come in and
make
you listen.”

Amery had been right, too. I wouldn’t have listened. Even now, I wished she wasn’t listening, because that would mean he wasn’t saying all these things. That he wasn’t broadcasting our lives to a campus full of students.

“…and right before her date arrived, she was pushing me out of her apartment, and she referred to me as a brother, which was just frustrating as hell, so I decided to make it clear I wasn’t her brother. I almost kissed her again, and I’m pretty sure she knew it, because she looked freaked out. In fact, that’s why I didn’t do it.”

Ian cleared his throat, the soft contemplative sound of his voice becoming more business-like.
“Well, hate to cut things off like this, but I’ve just been informed that I have to go to a commercial. The story continues when KRAZ returns.”

Until that moment, my body had been so stiff, my limbs shook with fatigue. Hearing the end of his segment, I jumped to my feet like I’d been released from a spring.

“Where are you going?” Chelsea asked.

I spun around, frantically searching for my flip-flops. “Where do you think I’m going? By my count, I have about five minutes before he announces to the entire university that we slept together.”

“Is that what you’re going to wear?”

I looked down at the old T-shirt and ratty sweatpants without much concern. “I’m not trying to look good for him. In fact, I’m pretty comfortable in this, and I’d rather be comfortable when I smack the hell out of him for doing this to me.”

“You’re not going to forgive him?”

I stilled, mouth agape. “Forgive him? First he sleeps with that whore, and now he’s telling everyone our private affairs on the air? I mean, honestly, I don’t have the first clue what’s going on in his mind, but I’m not going to let him paint himself the victim so everyone feels sorry for him. I’m the wronged party, here, or did you forget?”

“Ivy, you need to stop and think.”

I stopped. I thought. I came to the same conclusion. “No, I’m still going to smack him.”

I left the apartment, ran down the stairs and to my car. Jamming my key into the ignition, I paused just long enough to tune the radio to KRAZ. Then I peeled out of the parking lot. An advertisement for a local stereo installation company played as I left the complex and steered onto the empty roads. At least that was in my favor: It was nearly midnight on a Tuesday; very few cars would be on the road.

I was idling at the longest red light in the universe when Ian’s calm voice filled the car’s interior.

“Welcome back to KRAZ. When I last left off, I was sharing the details that led to the ending of
The Truths about Dating and Mating
. In short, how I fell in love with my best friend and co-host, and made every possible mistake along the way. Last I left off, Ivy had left on a blind date after I tried making my move. So, she showed up later at the bar where our regular group was, alone, which is a story I’m not going to get into.”

“Come on, come on!” I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel, cursing the red light. Three minutes had to have passed already and I was still at the stupid light. The fact that there wasn’t a single car on the road besides my own made it feel ten times longer.

“The entire time before she arrives I’m sweating buckets, anxious, promising God that if I can just take back that moment and if everything goes back to normal, I may actually go to church once in a while. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but you get the picture. I was nervous she’s falling in love with this guy, or… I don’t know, that I’ve screwed things up forever. You get the picture. So, she arrives – alone, like I said – and it was like a switch had been flipped. Not to go into too much detail, because none of this is really any of your damn business anyway, but instead of being freaked out, like I thought she would be, she seemed to have warmed up to the idea of at least testing the possibility of being more than friends.”

I bit my lip and tasted blood. Any moment he was going to reveal how I’d been all over him like a big slut, and here I was, stuck at an empty red light and completely powerless to stop him.

“Screw it,” I pressed my foot down on the accelerator and crossed the intersection.

The campus police cruiser appeared in my field of vision two seconds too late. Concealed behind the other wall of the Biological Sciences building’s parking lot, it looked to be lying in wait for students guilty of the crime I had just committed. My head dropped lower and I sucked in a breath, keeping my face forward and hoping against hope that my little maneuver had escaped the good officer’s attention.

That hope fled the minute I’d crossed over to the other side. A strobe of flashing red and blue lit the area.

“No, no, no, no!” I cried in defeat, steering the car to the curb. Just my luck! I’d never so much as trespassed in my life, not wanting to get a reputation for being a hellraiser like my mother. It didn’t seem fair that the first time I’d ever broken the law, I’d get caught. I lowered my head to the steering wheel and shook it slowly. How much worse could this night get?

Ian’s voice went on as the cruiser emerged from its spot and fell in line behind me.

“The two of us played pool and the things she was saying and even her body language…it was a total one-eighty compared to the moment at her front door hours earlier. She kept touching me, and throwing in these little flirtatious jabs at me.”
He chuckled, low and deep.
“I didn’t know
what
had gotten into her, but I wasn’t about to ask. I had learned my lesson the day before. Now, I was just going to enjoy it and see how far she’d take it.”

Hadn’t I had the very same thought? See how far he’d take it, even if it meant all the way?

Which, although it took another twenty-four hours to get there, was exactly what happened. And now, being stuck in my car without a shred of hope of stopping him, everybody listening was going to find out about it.

Lifting my head, I glanced in the rearview mirror to see the officer exiting his vehicle. I placed my hands on the steering wheel and waited.

The officer who arrived at my window was middle-aged and had a tired face. “Can you please turn off your engine?”

My eyes flashed to the stereo and I almost whimpered.
“Do I have to?”
Instead, I did as requested, hoping to expedite the process.

Silence filled the car. And in that moment, even though I dreaded what he was going to say, I desperately wished I’d at least get to hear it.

Ten minutes and a $60 ticket later, I started the car and slowly pulled back onto the campus street. I could see the officer waiting for me to do so, and kept an eye on the rearview window as I drove away. I didn’t relax until I saw him steer the cruiser into his previous hiding place.

And even then, a large portion of the tension remained, strumming through my body in waves.

“It was the best night of my life. I mean, hell, you guys wanna know why the show is over? It’s because I have no clue what I’m talking about. I’m just as clueless as the rest of you. Even worse, sometimes, I think. I didn’t have the first clue how to act the next time we saw each other. I decided to play it cool, hoping she’d give me some hints about how she wanted to handle it, but, it just hurt her feelings. From there, it was like quicksand. One screw up led to another and that led to another, and so on and so forth.”
He exhaled loudly in frustration.

He told the rest of the story from there, not leaving anything out. I remained in the car when I arrived at Manchester, listening to what he had to say.

My body tensed when he brought up what happened with Mallory. “
I went out with my roommate, and I was drunk and passed out. I felt someone climb into the bed with me, and I thought it was Ivy. I was just too out of it, though, and the room kept spinning. I passed out again, and the next thing I know, Ivy’s standing in my doorway, and I’m trying to figure out how that’s possible when she’s in bed with me. It wasn’t.”

I rubbed my forehead, remembering him looking between us and his baffled expression.

“What can I say? I’m an idiot. A lot of guys are. But if I had known she wouldn’t talk to me again, I would have gone after her. I didn’t though, and now I think I’ve lost her forever.”
He groaned, his voice growing agitated.
“And if any of you had even the slightest idea how horrible a feeling that is, how much I’ve truly lost… I mean, if any of you had the slightest concept of how much she has always meant to me, or even the kind of person she really is, you could probably understand why that loss is killing me. I’m not saying she’s a saint – far from it, trust me. She’s loud and she overreacts and she gets excited about things I’ll never understand. But she’s always been there for me, even when I was trying to push her away. Growing up, there were plenty of times when I tried to shut the world out, but she always had her toe in the door, refusing to let me slam it shut against her and the world. She has repeatedly refused to give up on me, even when I’m sure I deserved it. Now, that I’ve blown that, I’d give almost anything to have her here, still looking at me so stubbornly and refusing to give up on me.”

“Ivy, if you’re listening, I’m sorry. I’m
so
sorry about everything that’s happened. I’m sorry I didn’t know the right words to say, and that I didn’t trust you when you asked me to. I should have had more faith in you. If I could take everything I did wrong back, I would, in a heartbeat. Of course,”
he added with a chuckle so bitter it sounded like he was gargling glass,
“I’d probably make just as many mistakes, but hopefully not the ones that really counted. I just hope that you’ll be able to forgive me, someday.
” Dead air followed for about ten seconds before a slow song I’d never heard before began to play.

“My God.” I turned off the engine. Sniffling, I wiped the tears from my eyes and left the car.

I couldn’t define one emotion from the other as the elevator carried me to the fifth floor. While I was still fuming over Ian’s decision to announce our private business on the air, a million other conflicting feelings raged within me. And seeing as how each new sentiment bubbled to the forefront every second, I had absolutely no idea what I was going to say when I came face-to-face with Ian.