“Can we talk, just for a second?”

He stares at me, and there’s this light in his eyes. “Sure.”

It takes a little walking around to find a place where we can talk privately, but eventually I take him to this lounge area not too far from the pool, with comfortable seats where you can relax. Except there’s no relaxing right now. My heart feels like it’s ready to burst out of my chest. Josh watches me and my leg bounces up and down, my hands twitching nervously.

I take a deep breath.

“I owe you an explanation.”

“Okay.”

“The reason that Wyatt was here—at least the reason that I told myself he was here—was that I wanted you to get over me. And I thought that if I invoked our little Pull-Out Clause, then you’d get over me.”

“Right. I kind of gathered all of that last night,” he says, and then he stares at me expectantly. Except the thing is, I have no idea what to say next. There are a million things I could apologize for, so I don’t know where to start.

“And … I don’t think I can begin to understand how monumentally fucked that was for me to do.”

“I’m inclined to agree with you.”

I give him a sharp look.

Then, surprisingly, Josh lets out this low laugh. He scratches at his head uncomfortably, and then I can’t keep myself from laughing either.

“Hey,” he tells me, “you said it, not me.”

“Doesn’t mean that you have to agree.”

He smirks. “Well, if it’s got feathers and it quacks, it must be a duck.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” He shakes his head. “I should have seen that there was something going on. I mean, you hated Wyatt before all of this went down. I was pretty suspicious.”

“Yeah.”

“So what was the plan here? Pretend to date Wyatt, get me to get over you, then keep up the act at school?”

I rub my hands on my knees. “I didn’t really think much further ahead than this week.”

He laughs again, and there’s no mistaking that smile.

I smile at him. “You know, when I hear it out loud like that, I realize how stupid that sounds.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re an idiot.” Josh reclines in the chair.

I can’t argue with the evidence.

“I guess, um … I guess the reason that I wanted to talk to you out there … is so I could apologize to you.”

I wait for him to say something, anything, to give me the signal to move forward. But I guess his silence says enough.

I go on. “I treated you really poorly, even before we …”

“Ended things?”

I sigh. “Yeah. You poured your heart out to me, and I kind of—”

“Took a shit all over it?”

“Isn’t this my apology?”

“Yeah, but you’re bad at it.”