You Owe Me a Murder by Eileen Cook

Author:Eileen Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

Twenty

August 23

8 Days Remaining

I promised Detective Sharma I would notify her before leav-ing the city and caught up to Alex. He was walking quickly back toward Metford. His shoulders were hunched up around his ears. I tugged on the back of his shirt.

“Wait up.”

He stopped and I heard him sigh before he turned around.

“I can explain,” I said, not certain that I could.

“Why did you tell me you dated Connor? I don’t get it. First you don’t say anything, then you confess he was your ex, and now I hear you weren’t ever dating. I don’t understand.”

“Things were . . . complicated.” I couldn’t come up with anything better.

Alex crossed his arms over his chest. “But things with me aren’t supposed to be complicated. Why not tell me the truth?”

“Because I can’t handle the truth!” I burst out. “The truth is, I slept with him. I thought we were dating, I thought he was my boyfriend, but it was never that. It was just sex and I was too stupid to know it.”

A woman walking along the sidewalk paused as if she wanted to hear more.

Alex took my elbow and led me down the block, away from the people around us who were now staring. “You’re not stupid,” he said at last.

The fight bled out of me. No matter how much I tried to run away from the situation, it kept catching up to me. What did you call someone who slept with a guy an hour after he kissed her for the first time and then didn’t even realize that the only reason he kept seeing her was more sex? I didn’t always like myself, but I’d always seen myself as smart, and this made me face the fact that I wasn’t. At least not smart about people. “I wanted to believe he liked me.”

“Look, I don’t know what happened between you and Connor, and it’s none of my business. You don’t owe me some kind of list of every guy you’ve ever been with.”

“He’s the only guy,” I said quietly. Connor had been the only guy I’d ever even kissed, unless you counted Dex, who had shoved his tongue into my mouth at the spring dance in ninth grade.

Alex pulled me toward him. “I’m really sorry he hurt you.”

I closed my eyes and let myself melt into him. Alex was the first person to say that. Connor hadn’t cared how his actions made me feel. My best friend had been out of town and felt guilty about not being there. My dad hadn’t known what to say, and my mom had been annoyed the entire situation had blown out of control and embarrassed her. But Alex’s words were like cool water on a burn, making the sting evaporate.

We stood that way, Alex’s arms around me and my eyes closed, while people moved past us on the sidewalk.

“Yo, you two, touching moment, but I want the cash machine.” A bear of a man with hairy arms jutting out of

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