“You were there. You know what happened.” Please don’t make her spell it out.
Olivia scoffed softly. “The way I remember it, I texted you, told you Brad wanted to get back together, asked you what—”
“You shouldn’t have had to ask,” she blurted, cringing almost immediately. God, she couldn’t believe they were really doing this. “We spent the week together. We—I thought it meant something. I thought—” Fuck. Margot exhaled harshly and met Olivia’s eyes. “You were my first, you know? And it’s not like I ever planned to put a lot of stock in that sort of thing.” She licked her lips. “Or, I didn’t, until it was you. So yeah, it meant something to me. And I thought you knew that. Then you text me telling me your ex wants to get back together and you ask me what I think you should do? I’d have hoped the answer would’ve been obvious, but the fact that you asked, that you asked me . . . fuck, Liv. How do you think that made me feel? How do you think it made me feel when a few weeks later when I found out—secondhand—that you weren’t going to UW like we’d talked about, like we’d planned? That, instead, you’d thrown all our plans away to go to WSU instead. To be with Brad. How do you think I felt?”
As if Olivia choosing Brad hadn’t been bad enough, Margot had felt like her best friend, the girl she loved, the person she believed would always be there . . . suddenly wasn’t. Like Olivia was abandoning not just their plans, but Margot, too. Like maybe Margot hadn’t meant as much to Olivia as Olivia had to her. Not if she was so easy to move on from. So easy to forget.
Olivia guppied, mouth opening and shutting before she blurted, “That’s not what happened at all.”
Margot crossed her arms. “I was there, Liv. I’m pretty sure I know what happened.”
Olivia pressed a hand to her forehead and sighed. “Okay, first, I didn’t follow Brad to WSU. The scholarship I applied for? I got rejected.” Her lips twisted and she dropped her eyes. “Even with the scholarship, UW was going to be more expensive than WSU. Without it?” She shook her head. “If I had told Dad I had my heart set on UW, he’d have tried to figure something out, but I couldn’t ask him to do that. I couldn’t ask him to burden himself financially when I’d gotten into another perfectly good school that was offering me a scholarship.” Olivia scratched the tip of her nose. “Did it help that Brad was going there, too? That we were back together and that—at the time—he wanted me? That I knew he wanted me? I won’t lie and say that wasn’t a perk, a point in WSU’s favor. But it wasn’t the reason, Margot.”
Margot swallowed over the lump in her throat. “Oh.”
She bit back the next words that almost came out of her mouth. Why didn’t you tell me that? But she already knew the answer. They were barely talking back then, mostly because post-hookup, Margot had avoided Olivia, preferring to lick her wounds in private. To suffer in silence. Look how well that had served her.
“As for why I asked what you thought I should do, it’s because I wanted you to tell me that. I wanted you to tell me you wanted me. That’s why I asked. We hadn’t talked about it. What it meant. How we felt. I’d hoped you’d tell me . . .” Olivia’s teeth sank into her bottom lip. “All I wanted was for you to want me the way I wanted you.”
She had. God, had she ever. “I did. I . . .” She shook her head. “That was eleven years ago, Liv. We were eighteen and—”
“We shouldn’t waste time on what-ifs.” Olivia’s lips quirked, smile small and subdued. “You’re right. Who’s to say what would’ve happened? There’s a million ways it could’ve gone right and a million more ways it could’ve blown up in our faces.”
Margot nodded. As much as she’d wanted Olivia back then, she hadn’t been ready for a serious relationship at eighteen. Clearly, her communication skills had needed some work—in all likelihood they still did, but she was a work in progress and she was trying and wasn’t that half the battle, really?—and all that teenage angst had been a recipe for disaster. “But now?”
Olivia leaned in, lips brushing the corner of Margot’s mouth in a kiss that was far too brief. She drew back and met Margot’s eyes. “Now.”
Chapter Nineteen
Olivia stretched an arm out toward the nightstand, rolling onto her side when her fingers skimmed nothing but smooth wood, her phone too far to reach.