TANGLED PLANS

39

I find Max's eyes on me after I'm looking after the girl that just passed us. Lilah has long gone to her spot, but I was still looking at the place she walked toward. "Hey, Daise?" I hear him call out to me, prompting me to turn to him with my cheeks heating up.

Max had a knowing smile, like he knew all the thoughts that had been conjuring through my mind. Sometimes I hated that he could read me so well and so little at the same time. His expression turns to a teasing one when he asks, "What?"

"Nothing," I reply back quickly, since he already knew what. Why would I tell him something he already knew? I then think about when I share my feelings for him in May and then start to wonder if he already knows I liked him. I mean, I was an open book, and I'm pretty sure everyone knew I liked him. Brayden wasn't surprised that I liked him either.

Max's head moves forward until I can see his full head in my peripheral view. I avert my gaze to the other side of the room in an attempt not to look at him. But then I find his arms leaning toward the front again. God, could he stop being annoying?

I hated that I liked how he was giving me attention. I didn't want this kind of attention, though, and yet... I don't know. A small part of me was hoping that this little teasing thing could turn into him wanting to talk about where we had left off. I then think about the texts and how I waited a full week for him to mention something about prom night, but he hadn't. Then I asked him about it, and he promptly ignored it.

I didn't know what Max was playing at.

"So did you enjoy the moment from the assembly today?" Max continued to talk even though the teacher had told us to read over the syllabus. I open the packet of paper, and my eyes scan the words in front of me, but my mind isn't registering any of them. I tried to block Max's voice, but he was all I could hear. "I thought I did pretty well considering I hadn't known about it until I walked into school a few minutes ago."

I don't reply to that, and Max continues. "See, now, the dancing wasn't something anybody warned me for. Or—"

"The kiss?" I interrupt him to say. I wasn't supposed to say anything! It was hard to block out Max when I had been thinking about the kiss, the way he was surprised by it, and then only for him to put his arm around her.

Max is silenced by my question, and I flip the page of the packet, pretending I hadn't said it at all. "Yeah, um, Ashlyn did it as a joke. She knows everyone knew we were a thing, and you know, three months later, things may have happened again."

"Did they?" I ask because I wanted to know if I was the only girl he was texting from across the ocean. I couldn't be the only one he was texting. Then I think back to the brief mentions my brother made of Max not bringing him back. There were mentions of him at the July 4 pool party, and many others were saying that Max hadn't texted them back. Max had gone away this summer without making a single contact with anyone.

But he was contacting me. Maybe he had contacted Ashlyn as well.

"Ashlyn and I?" Max asks with surrealism laced into his voice. His eyes cut to mine, and there's amusement in them when he says, "No, I wouldn't go back to her."

I look away from him and toward the front board again. The teacher had just announced that for the rest of the class, we were to think about how we could put forth this idea she shared in the future. Half of the students had pulled their phones out, so obviously it was a rhetorical question.

"I didn't see you with Justin," Max says after a beat of silence.

I feel my hair on my face when I turn and have to tuck it in my ear when I look at him with an incredible look. "He used me. Why would I be with him?"