I take the damn thing, wipe my glistening mouth, and hand it back to him.

He shakes his head. “Keep it. It’s yours.”

I peer behind my shoulder and realize Callum’s cab left. I didn’t even get to say goodbye. It makes me want to slap myself across the face, because I know he witnessed at least some of this exchange.

I look down, realizing that what I’m holding is mine. Or rather it was, before I threw it into the trash.

I wiped my boyfriend’s kiss off with The Boar’s Head napkin.

A NOTE FROM CALLUM BROOKS

At this point, you are wondering why.

Why did I leave these two alone, considering their history? Ninety-eight percent of logical people in the world wouldn’t. This is a made-up statistic, so don’t try to look for it on the internet, but still.

Allow me to enlighten you as to why I left.

There’s a story my father told me once when the roads to London were blocked due to a snowstorm and I missed a date with the duchess of a-place-I-can’t-disclose-in-England. She went on and met someone else while she was waiting for me. They got married. I missed my chance of becoming royalty.

Because of snow.

I thought it was the worst day of my life.

The story goes like this: A boy begs his father to get him a dog. Not a particular dog, any rat-looking one would do. The boy dreams of owning a dog, breathes the idea, and obsesses over it. Time passes. The father hangs the condition of having a dog over the boy’s head. The boy does everything his father tells him to. Makes the best grades, excels at sports, stays out of trouble. He is on the straight and narrow, and does everything he possibly can to get a dog.

One Christmas, his father finally gets him a bloody dog.

The boy is devoted to the dog, aptly named Dog. The dog is his entire life. The boy feeds it the best food, takes it on long walks in green, lush fields. Tends to its fur and takes it to the vet for checkups. One day, during their walk, a storm brews. The boy realizes he and Dog can’t get home, so he looks for shelter. He finds a cave in the middle of a forest and slips in. It rains hard. Dog is scared, cold, and shivering. The boy cannot bear the idea of losing his beloved pet, the one he’d done everything in his power to win and keep. He hugs the dog tight the entire time, until the storm passes. When the sun reappears, the boy looks down and realizes to his horror that he suffocated the dog in his quest to save him.

Moral of the story: clutching something desperately doesn’t mean you’re going to keep it. You might just kill it.