All Chapters of Falling For The Boy I Was Never Supposed To Love: Chapter 11 - Chapter 14

The rain had stopped, but the air still smelled like it — wet pavement and something cold that clung to her jacket.Amara stood very still.Julian hadn't moved either, which was almost worse. He was close enough that she could see the way his throat worked when he swallowed, the small tell he probably didn't know he had."You found me on purpose."She hadn't meant it to come out so quiet. Almost gentle. Like she was giving him a way out of it.His expression did something complicated — not guilt, not exactly, but something that lived in the same neighborhood. Something that looked like a man who'd been carrying a thing for so long he'd forgotten what it felt like to put it down.Her stomach turned."Oh my God."Neither of them spoke.She'd always been good at reading silences. Her mother's silences, her teachers', the loaded kind that filled up classrooms before bad news. She knew what this one meant before Julian opened his mouth, which is why when he finally said *I didn't plan for

---The thing about pretending you were fine was that it required energy Amara didn't have on a Monday morning.She'd spent Sunday doing everything right. She'd slept. She'd eaten. She'd sat at her desk and stared at her homework until the words stopped swimming. She'd told herself, very firmly and very rationally, that what Julian had revealed didn't change anything fundamental about who she was or what she wanted.She'd almost believed it.Almost.The problem was the letter.Not a physical one — she didn't have those anymore, she'd thrown them away twice and printed them again twice, which said something embarrassing about her that she refused to examine. The problem was the feeling of the letters. The voice of them. Calm and steady and never asking for anything. She'd read them when she was sixteen and thought: whoever this is, they see me.And now she knew who it was.And she didn't know what to do with that.So she did what she always did when she didn't know what to do.She walk