Problematic Summer Romance (Not in Love, #2)

by Ali Hazelwood

Tisha rolls her eyes. “I hate emotionally unavailable people.” “You made Diego propose three times before accepting,” Rue points out. “That’s different. Men need to be kept on their toes—”

“It’s not true, what he told Avery. That he can’t be with her because he’s still in love with me. Because—he simply isn’t. Either he was lying to her, or he’s lying to himself.” There is a third option, of course: that he was referring to someone else altogether. But Minami has no way of knowing. In fact, no one does. No one but me.

I nod, reassuring. Pull her in for a hug, and don’t bother telling her the truth: That everything Minami had to fight and scrape and beg to learn, every little detail about Conor’s family, I knew already. He told me when we first met in Scotland. He told me over countless late-night phone calls over the past three years. He told me when I asked, and he told me when I didn’t.

Because one day, Conor Harkness decided that he wanted someone to know him. And he chose me.

okay?” I ask, cautious. “Yeah.” A deep inhale. “Yeah. I just wanted to listen to you exist.”

Kaede was born a week ago, and we were both at Minami’s today, sitting next to each other, taking turns holding her and smelling her head. Marveling at every yawn, blink, squeeze of her little finger. Tuning out the conversation to just stare at her. He calls me the second he gets home. I’m waiting, phone in my hand. “Do you want a family?” I ask him after a while. “At some point, I mean.” His windows must be open. I can hear the distant sounds of traffic. “I’m not sure how to explain it.” “Okay.” I wait, patient. Knowing that he’ll get there. He always does. “I don’t think that my default state is wanting a family,” he says. “But if I was with the right person, I would want it so much, I wouldn’t be able to focus on anything else. I would constantly imagine that she…” He stops. A sharp breath. Laughter, maybe. “It would require a lot of changes, anyway.” “Such as?” “I’d want the parenting to be evenly split. I’d have to restructure my work schedule. My habits.” “You could do that.” “Yeah, I…Yeah. What about you? Do you want a family?” “I love kids. They’re just fun, you know? But I love the idea of having my own kids. I know Eli loathed Mom and Dad, but I had so much fun with them. I would tease them and they’d get all mad at me and then I’d tease them even more, and they’d look at each other as if to say, ‘What even is this terrible child we made?’ But with pride. I’d like something like that.” I swallow. “I’d love to make someone feel the way they made me feel. Like the...

It’s well past midnight. The unpredictable, witching hour. The time when we talk about things we shouldn’t. Slow conversations. Lots of drifting off. Questions and answers that don’t quite connect.

I’m being devious. I’m being unfair and problematic and manipulative.

okay and you ate

“You’re assuming that I can’t think clearly when you’re around.” “I can’t think clearly when you are around.”

“It’s the way you take over the space around you. You remind me constantly, loudly, indecently, of all the little things that make you you. It’s impossible to escape,

It’s unsettling, how easily I slip back into my adolescent tactics, as though the instinct to lie, deflect, omit will forever be embedded within me.

The anger is high up in my throat. And it always leads down the same path. “Conor.” “Yes, Maya.” “Genuinely, from the bottom of my heart…Fuck off.” I hang up. We don’t talk for the following ten months.

period.

“I’m not afraid of you. I am afraid of myself, and of the person I become when I’m around you.”

“I have never wanted anything as desperately, as ungovernably, as persistently as I want you. Not a single goddamn thing. Not my dead mother back. Not revenge. Not the well-being of the people I love. Not professional success, not even my own happiness. Absolutely nothing has consumed me as mercilessly as you have.”

Every day since that phone call, I spent remaking the choice to free you of my presence in your life, so that you could have a better one. Make no mistake, Maya: we may not have spoken or seen each other, but for the last ten months my relationship with you was the most labor-intensive and all-encompassing presence in my life.”

“Do you want me to leave?” “It would be best if—” “Not the question I—” “No, Maya. I never want you to be anywhere but with me.”

“You were always there.” “Where?” “In my mind.”

“Since the first day I met you, you have been the best thing in my life. And you weren’t even in it.”

warmth. “I’m saying that I already know I’m in love with you, and that I have little interest in being apart from you. I don’t need you in small doses, because…I want it all.”

I was trying to protect you from something that you never even considered a threat, when the only thing that really matters is…” “The triumph of the free market?” “You.”

“There is a power differential here. I have and will again admit to having been a stubborn idiot when it comes to you, but to be clear, I do not think that the issues I brought up are no longer there. You remain much younger. I mean, I’d bet a good third of my assets that the waiter is currently wondering why I can’t look away from my daughter.”

can this man please stop being morally correct for once 😞😣

But I woke up a couple of years ago and realized that you’d completely flipped that for me.” “Why?” “Because no matter what, or where, or when, you would make it spectacular. Whatever situation, you’d make it worth living. I’d get up and you’d be there, looking beautiful and saying the most annoying things and driving me nuts and making me laugh. And I would love every second of it. Because it’s with you.

But in my defense, for a while there, I didn’t think I was in love.” My eyebrow must arch, because he continues: “It was too all-consuming. Too gut-wrenching. And I thought—I thought, ‘I’ve been in love before. This is not what that felt like.’ “And then I realized that I simply hadn’t known what love was supposed to feel like,

safe in the knowledge that we’re both here to stay.

“If the wedding isn’t happening, Tamryn and I need to go back to Ireland as soon as possible.” My stomach squeezes with—No. Nope. I’m not going to panic over this, not before he’s told me, “Why?” “The estate.” “Has she reached a settlement?” “Maybe. Things are looking up, because my brothers started fighting each other.” “Heartwarming.”

waitttt queen go with himmmmm

“I get it. She needs you, and she’s family. Is there anything I can do to—” “You could come with me.”

YESSSSS

I began writing parts of it right after I turned in Not in Love, in 2023, when my friend Jen told me that she wanted Hark and Maya’s story. And let’s be honest: I mostly write to impress you, Kennifer.

Above all: Happy birthday, Jen. I hope we get to be weird together for many more years.