I close my eyes and lean my head back against the door. The coward in me wants to skulk off to my room, call my dad, and tell him to get Olivia the hell away from me, where I can’t do any more damage to her.

But I’m done being a coward. I need to face her myself.

Slowly, deliberately, I climb to my feet. I lift a hand and knock gently with one knuckle, but the crying doesn’t so much as break. I knock harder. This time there’s a pause. A little hiccup. But the door doesn’t open.

“Olivia.” My voice is hoarse. “Can I come in?”

I’m prepared for all of the possible responses she could toss at me. Silence. Fuck off. I hate you. Go away. But I’m not really prepared for her to open the door. And I’m certainly not prepared for the pressure in my chest when I see her.

I barely register the swollen eyes, red nose, and matted hair. I can’t seem to get past the immeasurable hurt written all over her face.

I do the only thing I can think of. I wrap my arms around her.

She lets me.

I caused her heart-wrenching pain, and she’s letting me hold her.

Nothing has ever felt so good.

I inch her backward into the bedroom just enough to kick the door shut before gathering her as close as possible. She buries her face in my shoulder and sobs. I don’t know how she has any tears left, but she does.

I rub my hands up and down her back and over her shoulders in the most soothing motions I can think of. I turn my face into her soft hair. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, my lips pressed to her head. “I’m so damned sorry.”

Her sobs turn to cries, the cries to hiccups, the hiccups to shuddering breaths. And then finally, finally, she falls silent. She leans back slightly to look at me, and I tense, ready for the words I know I deserve.

But she doesn’t lay into me or call me names. She doesn’t let me know in explicit detail that I deserve to die a miserable death. (Although I do. I know I do).

Instead, she does the last thing I expect. She talks to me. She rests her forehead against my collarbone and just talks.

“I didn’t mean to, you know,” she says, her voice raspy from crying. “I’ve asked myself a million times if some little part of me knew what Michael was going to tell me . . . what he was going to do . . . when I went over there that day. But I’ve replayed it a million times, and I wouldn’t have gone if I’d known. I wouldn’t have willingly put myself in the situation of hurting Ethan. If you could have seen his face . . .”

Olivia lets out a shuddering breath, and I pull her even closer, rubbing a palm over her back. I want to tell her that in the big scheme of things, this is nothing. That she’ll get over it, that Ethan’s already over it, but I know that to her this is big. I let her continue.

“I went to Michael’s house . . . up to his room, thinking he wanted to talk about this girl, Casey, who he’d kind of been seeing. Since he’d never had a serious girlfriend, I figured he was just getting cold feet, or whatever.”

She’s quiet for a moment.

“But he didn’t want to talk about Casey,” I say, helping her along.

She shakes her head. “No. He was acting weird from the second I got there. Michael and I have always been so comfortable together. Or so I thought. But he was jumpy. He would alternate between not meeting my eyes and then looking at me too long and too hard, as though he was searching for something.”

God help me, I’m actually feeling sorry for the poor guy. I’m all too aware of what it’s like to be helplessly drawn to this girl, even though you know you should be staying far, far away from her.

“I didn’t see it coming,” she continues, giving a little shake of her head. “One second I was yammering about how excited I was about the internship I’d just applied for, and the next second he’s grabbing my hands, his face just inches from mine, and he’s telling me that he can’t do it anymore. That Ethan’s his best friend, but he can’t do it. That he can’t see me with Ethan without me knowing . . .”

She breaks off.

“He told you he loved you?” I say.

She nods before lifting her head to look me in the eye. “Then he kissed me. And I didn’t push him away. I let him kiss me.”

The agony on her face is clear, and I want to tell her not to talk about it anymore, but I know she needs to get it off her chest. Very gently I put my palms on either side of her face. “Why? Did you love him back?”

Please say no.

“No,” she whispers, her tongue slipping nervously to wet her lips. “But as for why, I’ve asked myself that a million times, and I think . . . I think I kissed him because I knew it was a way out. Ethan and I were getting more and more serious every day, and he was the only guy I’d ever been with, and everyone, myself included, acted like we were going to be engaged at any moment, and I just—”

“You didn’t want that.”

“No,” she says with an outward breath. “I thought I did. I wanted to want it. I loved Ethan so much. But somewhere, deep inside of me, something was off. Things were really good, but I wanted more.”

“And more was Michael?”

Her face contorts. “No. I knew as soon as his lips touched mine that that wasn’t right either, but then I kissed him back, harder, wanting to feel something, anything. It didn’t go . . . I mean, I didn’t sleep with him. Not even close. But neither was it just a simple kiss in which I pushed him away and slapped his cheek. I kept trying to lose myself in the kiss, so it got kind of intense, and then Ethan walked in.”