Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
KELSEY
There’s something in his voice. This vulnerability I’m not used to from him, but it’s nice. I told Adrian he’s like a geode, and it’s a little bit true. My mind goes back to when he pulled me into that waltz. Like maybe there are sparkly worlds inside of him.
He sits down next to me. “Dare I ask about the cake?”
“Nope.”
“Something to look forward to.” The way he looks at me now—his eye crinkle deepens, and I feel this warmth spread through my chest. “Thanks for helping make it work. It was nice, working as a team.”
I shift and plop my legs onto his lap, leaning back against the armrest. “You took it well. The initial shock.”
“I won’t lie. The initial shock was immense.”
“I’m sorry I disturbed you in your workshop today,” I say.
“It’s fine, Kelsey. I shouldn’t have...I’m not used to people going in there like that. Nobody goes in.”
“Nobody gets to go in there, even to clean?”
“Nobody. Ever.”
Out. I can’t stop thinking about him saying it like that.
“Why?” I ask. “Is it because they might make you drop things like I did?”
He slides a hand along my calf. The touch is casual, but it lands somewhere deep inside me anyway. Lately, every little thing seems to.
I feel closer to him than I did a week ago. Closer than I did when we were having sex.
Like somewhere along the way, without my permission, this stopped being physical.
“I just don’t want people in there.”
“Do you not like them to see your work in progress?”
“It’s a lot of things.”
I stare out at the fairy lights, wishing he would tell me...
anything, really. I feel close to him, but it’s inside of the walls of a completely fake relationship.
How sad is that? And what was that stuff about his father?
In a golden cage or whatever? Is that what the secret’s about?
Or is that just another thing I don’t know about him?
“I’ve been terrible to you,” he says suddenly. “I’ve treated you like someone who could be bought. I’m not good with people, but that’s no excuse.”
I press my hand to his cheek, and he goes still. His stubble is rough, but his cheek is warm, and nice. I slide my hand down to his jaw, just a little bit, just wanting to keep the touch going. “Thank you for saying that, but we’re good.”
“No. There’s something else. Something I should have told you days ago.”
My heart pounds. I have a sense that he’s gonna tell me that he’s falling for me. I might be falling for him, too. I just, just might be. I try not to smile like a maniac. “What?”
His brows are drawn together, serious over his soft gray eyes.
He says, “At the wedding. I learned something about your family.”
“Yeah? What?”
“It’s about your grandmother—Granny Ernie.”
“Oh no—what? Is she okay?”
“No, it’s nothing like that. She’s fine. It’s just that, she forced Danielle to invite you.”
“What? What are you talking about? No, that’s not true. Danielle wanted me there. She even asked me to help with the invitations. We did the calligraphy together.”
“Because she had to.”
I frown. “No.”
His hands are warm on my shin. He keeps them there, like an anchor.
“Granny Ernie was using some sort of financial leverage with them. It sounded like a condition of paying for the wedding, but maybe it was more. She told your family that if they didn’t invite you to the wedding, if they didn’t make an effort to bring you back into the fold, she’d withhold some sort of financial help. ”
A dark stone forms at the pit of my belly. “Granny Ernie does control a chunk of family money. But she was never one to throw her weight around. You must have misheard.”
He explains the conversation he overheard at the croquet match, and then his interaction with Uncle Jasper.
My pulse races. “But they wouldn’t pretend like that...
I would know...” Even as I form my feeble protests, I’m replaying scenes from the weekend.
The inexplicable coolness. People’s strained politeness.
How I felt like I was having to prove myself the whole time.
The couch pile of cousins seeming to go formal as I approached.
The horizon has gone the color of a bruise with the water and the sky merging into the same sad mélange.
“Oh my God.”
“I’m sorry.” He keeps his gentle hands on my calf, as if to ground me. It’s the only nice thing in the world right now.
“People seemed...not that warm, but I thought it was about the time apart. Like we’d become strangers and it would just take a while to get used to each other again or something.
Or maybe they felt bad for how they had treated me, but I never thought the whole thing was a facade. How did I not see that?”
“You wanted to be back with your family.”
I shake my head, shocked at my unwillingness to see what was in front of my face. The whole weekend—every single moment I treasured—was a transaction. I was a condition. Not a daughter. Not a sister. A box to check off.
“It was a shit thing to do,” he says.
“That croquet match was days ago. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wanted to, but there never seemed to be a right time.”
“Because I’d cry and freak out and make a scene in the middle of my sister’s wedding?
” I say as the tears begin to fall. I turn and sit up, facing away from him.
“God, maybe that was for the best. When’s the best time to tell a perfect stranger that their family is pretending to like them for money?
And not even doing a very good job of it? I am such a fool.”
“You wanted it to be true.”
“I made myself stupid with hope.”
“Hope isn’t stupid. It’s brave.” He touches my shoulder.
I sniff derisively, head in hands, surrounded by confetti hearts, fairy lights, all of it. “Everything is fake. My family is fake. This—” I gesture at the yacht, the decorations, us. “This whole thing. So much for my big ideas that they would know my heart, huh? How delusional.”
“It’s not delusional.”
“Desperate, then? Will you accept desperate?”
“Kelsey.”
I glare at the Chumpywumpy banner. HEART YOU, CHUMPYWUMPY. I want to rip it down. “I’m just the hired help. With my family and here, too, on this boat. I mean, let’s face it.”
“You’re more than that,” he says.
A droning motorboat sound floats in on the breeze. “You’re just trying to make me feel better. It won’t work. We’re a good team with maybe some sexual chemistry and we’re good at pulling things off together.”
Bruno kneels in front of me. “Hey.”
“Go away. You don’t need to be acting like you care.”
“I’m not acting.”
“Well, maybe I want you to go away so I can sit here and cry in my party dress and then I’m going to eat that entire cake.”
“I’ll help you.”
“You don’t even like cake.”
“I would eat it for you.”
Soft waves lap at the hull of the boat. Moonlight glints off furniture arranged at perfect angles.
My mind keeps racing over the scenes of the weekend. “I thought they knew me. Yes, I’m the black sheep of the family, the dancer with her garish clothes and earrings too big and still living with roommates instead of getting a real life, but to think I’d steal from the family.”
He curls a bit of hair behind my ear, but no way will I look up and let him see my probably blotchy, swollen face, but what do I care? He’ll be done with me in a day or two. I’m just the hired help, even though I meant those things about him being like a geode.
Maybe that’s just my life. Doomed to want more from people than they’ll ever want to give me.
Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, some kind of music starts playing. It’s lively and bright and it feels like it’s mocking me. I lift my head. “What the hell?”
Bruno wears a murderous expression. “I’ll go see who’s doing that.” He stands.
“No, wait.” I reach up and catch his hand. “They’re here for the party. They’re late.”
“You ordered musicians?”
I’m a mess—I can feel it. There’s no way mascara isn’t running down my face; I’m just hoping I don’t look like a member of KISS. “Worst. Soundtrack. Ever,” I say.
He snorts softly. “Should I make them leave? Or we could dance.”
“Fuck off with the dance.”
He goes and leans over the side and says something.
A motor starts up and they buzz back to shore, the sound of the outboard cutting the silence like a small buzz saw.
I go to the railing next to Bruno, watching them head back to their families and lives or whatever.
Back to the people who love them and believe in them.
The night goes silent. And I’m bereft.
I didn’t know the meaning of the word until now, but I’ve genuinely lost my family. I kept thinking that if only they would remember who I was. But maybe they looked into my heart and hated what was there. Why else would they be so willing to believe something that wasn’t true?
“I get why you waited to tell me,” I say to Bruno. “I get how much it probably sucks to have to tell this person you barely know that her whole family life is fake. That her whole existence is all mirror tricks and maraschino cherries with fake colors and fake chemicals. A lot of nothing.”
I can feel him looking at me in that intense way. “I should’ve told you sooner, and as for the rest of it? Me barely knowing you? This bullshit about your existence?”
“Don’t. You don’t have to—”
He takes my hand and pulls me across the aft deck, away from the Chumpywumpy banner and the dorky cake and to the stairway to the owner’s deck.
“If you think I’m going to have sex with you now—”
“I need to show you something.” He leads me up a hushed corridor I’ve only been in once before. I know where we’re going before we get there.
The workshop.
His no-go zone.
He doesn’t say anything ceremonial about it. He just opens the door and walks in, pulling me along.
The tools are still laid out with surgical precision. There’s a single lamp throwing warm light onto the workbench where he sat. It smells like metal and sandalwood, which I didn’t notice before.
Is he going to show me a watch?
He goes to a drawer and takes out a rock. It’s dark and heavy-looking, like a big, mottled egg.
“This is what I make the watch faces from,” he says. “Iron meteorite. This piece is around four and a half billion years old, and then it burst in through our atmosphere, flashing through the sky. Most of them burn up.”
“A meteor?”
“This is the part that lasted.” His voice is so full of awe.
It’s awesome being in his weird inner sanctum, like being in a monk’s cell or something, but I’m not in the mood for science talk. I’m thinking about eating the cake as he turns it over in his hand.
“When you cut them open, it’s pure black with an intrinsic crystalline pattern that forms over millions of years of cooling.
It can’t be faked. It can’t be manufactured or replicated.
Scientists have tried. It’s the one material that is only and exactly what it is.
A true thing. One of the only real and true things on Earth. That’s why it’s breathtaking.”
“So... Are you trying to say that this proves not everything is fake? Is that what you’re saying?”
He looks up. “Oh, no. Most things are fake. Most people are fake. Most emotions are a total charade. But this is real.” He puts it in my hand.
It’s warm. I don’t know why that surprises me. This ancient, dense, impossible thing from outer space.
“And you’re showing me why?”
“Because it reminds me of you.”
Pulse pounding, I close my fingers around it. That was weirdly sweet. Nerdily sweet.
His hand comes up—slowly, like he’s not sure he’s allowed—and pushes a strand of hair off my face. His fingertips barely touch my temple.
“Thank you for saying that. It’s sweet.”
“It’s true.”
We stand there in his workroom in the middle of nowhere on the ocean.
“Bruno.” My voice comes out small.
“What is it?”
“Are we a couple who compares each other to rocks?”
His lip quirks. He takes the meteorite from my hand and sets it back carefully in its drawer.
“I like that.”
Just then, a whistle sounds out. “What is that?”
“Dinner in ten. Are you hungry?”
“Starving, but...” I don’t have it in me to go back up on deck and interact. Or even sit upright.
“What do you want?”
I wrap my arms around myself. “Whenever I’m upset about something, I put on my flannel PJs and get cozy in bed with a grilled cheese sandwich and a can of ginger ale with a straw and watch a reality show. I don’t have access to any of those things. I don’t even have the PJs.”