The Break-Up Pact

by Emma Lord

“If that means we’re friends, that means we’re friends. But June…” He reaches out and holds the tips of my fingers with his hand, light and searching. “What I felt for you then? What I feel for you now? It never went away.”

I’m staring up at Levi and thinking to myself I could see every edge of the world a hundred times over and never see anything half as beautiful as him.

“You have no idea how many times I’ve thought about this,” he tells me.

“Oh, I hated it,” he says. “Because every time you moved in it, all I could think about was getting you out of it.”

“You shouldn’t have told me about that dress. I’m going to use it against you.” He lifts his head to look at me and says plainly, “June. You could use anything against me.”

“You have all of me,” he says. “However much you want.”

And my throat aches almost as much as the rest of me then, because it’s one thing to know it, but another thing to hear it.

“Is that why you were always so intent on kicking my ass?” I smirk into his shoulder. “Someone had to keep you humble.”

“Do you like it?” Levi asks, this time slower, closer to my ear. “Yeah,” I breathe.

And he picks up the pace again and says, “Then let me.”

“June, June,” like it’s something precious, something holy.

then he’s sliding back home,

the way I know deep down, further than any of this goes, that he is the only person I ever want to say my name like that.

“I’m…” Everything, I want to say. I’m everything I’ve never been, everything I didn’t even know to ask for, because I didn’t know it existed.

He smiles down at me, the kind of smile I’ve never seen on him before, easy and slow and dazed. Mine.

“Good,” he murmurs into my ear. “Because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

The understanding, and the calm in it. The way I don’t have to be anybody but myself in this moment, because he understands my heart by touch alone.

He kisses my forehead, and something about that simple gesture—the familiarity, the ease of it—pulses a current of absolute giddiness through me.

“It wasn’t ‘just’ anything to me. You know that.” Levi’s tone can’t settle, torn between insistence and hurt.

His eyes soften then, like he’s seeing it all play out on my face. “Being with you makes me happy,” he says. “Tell me to just stay here, and I’ll do it.”

“June,” he says, pressing the words into my hair. “I meant everything I said that night.”

“Hey,” says Levi, grazing his nose against my temple. He stays close, his breath warm against my cheek. “We’re going to be okay. These weeks will fly by. I’ll be back, and things at Tea Tide will settle, and we’ll throw Mateo and Dylan the best damn wedding Benson Beach has ever seen and make total fools of ourselves on the dance floor.”

“The girlfriend the main character is so tortured about in your New York book. The one he loves but feels like he has to leave behind, to break up with for her own good.” I close my eyes, feeling a rueful smile bloom on my face. “That’s me, isn’t it?”

When I open my eyes again, Levi’s own smile is just as sad. “I was just—processing, in my own way,” he says. “I missed you so badly. You have no idea.”

When you love someone the way I love Levi, it becomes every bit as much a feeling as it is a part of your own soul. Something inevitable. Something permanent. Something that never quite had a clear beginning and will never end.

It should be an earth-shattering moment, letting myself acknowledge that I’m in love with Levi. But it isn’t. It’s quiet and gentle and sure.

“It’s only a story, June,” he says. “We get to make our own endings.”

But I was ready for this. Sana made me watch the clip ten times a night like it was exposure therapy. I might as well be watching a video of paint drying.

He opens his mouth to say something else he must have rehearsed, but I cut him off, leaning toward Archie. “No, no, Archie, keep it rolling,” I say gamely. “I’m trying to get a Kleenex sponsorship over here.”

A text from Sana pops up, the only notification I bother opening: I got you a ticket for the 6pm bus back if you can make it. I hope Sana is prepared for me to kiss her on the damn mouth the instant that bus turns in to Benson Beach.

But Levi didn’t tell me that he told her, which means it could only have been motivated by one thing. He wasn’t telling her for the sake of clearing the air. He was telling her because there was a part of him, however slight, that still didn’t want what he had with Kelly to be over. And he didn’t tell me because he felt ashamed.

The fear of knowing I’d have to climb back down, and the comfort of knowing no matter how long it took, Levi would always be waiting patiently for me at the bottom.

“We’ve been running away from a lot of things, June. I don’t want to run anymore.”

“All I wanted was to be home,” he says, his voice almost catching on the word. “I wanted to be running on this beach. I wanted to be close to my parents. And most of all, I wanted to be with you, eating cold pizza on your couch, getting smushed in your car to go on another ridiculous date, working side by side in the back of Tea Tide all day.”

He leans in so our foreheads are pressing together. I’m breathless, my eyes wide open into his, feeling the words before he says them. Like hearing it out loud is just a tidal wave of a current I’ve felt my whole life. “I love you, June.”

“It’s the only thing I’m certain about. The only thing I always will be.”

The tears are quiet and insular and the kind that are only meant for me and for Annie. For two little girls who had big ideas and thought they had all the time in the world to see them through.

I’m not stalling because I’m scared of asking Annie. I’m stalling because I’m scared of moving forward myself.

Levi’s response is so swift it knocks around the air in my chest. “I can get on the next bus.”

But underneath that want, there’s a steadiness I never felt when I thought I was in love before. The trust in Levi that whether he comes back now or comes back later, he is coming back. The trust in myself that I can be a whole person without Levi and make all these decisions with a confidence all my own.

I feel another kind of trust right then. A trust Levi has in me not just to know what I need right now, but to tell him the truth. And the respect he’ll have for that decision either way.

“I was in the back of Tea Tide pretending to write for weeks. I picked up a few tricks.” His cheeks tinge pink. “Or maybe I just liked watching you bake.”

“I missed you,” I say into his shoulder. He presses his fingers into my back. “I’m glad to be home.” The word home hums under my skin, spreads another, softer warmth through me.

So he doesn’t mean home like a place; he means the home right here in each other’s arms.

And now Levi, here and making scones with his own hands, part of this new world of mine that’s been opening up by the day. One that feels wider and more full of potential than it ever did, even when I was seeing more of the world than anyone I knew. One that makes me feel more like myself than I have in years. My life is more unsettled than it’s ever been, but I’ve never felt more settled in it.

“Thank you, June. Not for saving these, uh … banner ideas from teenage me,” he says, not without a bit of sheepishness. He lowers his voice. “But for reminding me. And for believing in me.”

“I’m not going to be smug. I’m going to be insufferable.”

I nod, the grin on my face softening into a close-lipped smile. Whatever it is that’s crackling in the back of his eyes right now, I feel it, too. I’ve been feeling it ever since the truck hit the road and I started getting a front-row seat to people’s reactions to the old scone specials.

As if on cue, Sana waltzes into the kitchen, hair pulled into her topknot, rocking the new apron she embroidered for herself that says SCONE DADDY on the front pocket. She halts the moment she sees Levi.

“Neither of you wants to change the other one or tell the other what to do. You just want each other to be happy. And that’s what love is supposed to look like.”