CHAPTER 11 #3
It shook me how close to the truth he’d gotten so quickly. I tried to shake it off. “Why would Carter impress—”
“Because he’s a Pembleton. Because they’re big in the law field. Because you think your dad is simple and easily impressed by a daughter gunning for a grand future.” Beck tsked under his breath. “Your dad didn’t seem that impressed to me.”
And just like that, Beck proved once again how easily he could find the gaps in my armor, his words like a blade slicing through me.
No, more than just his words—it was the leveled expression he had to match.
With amusement and something darker simmering in his eyes, his lips twitched as if they threatened to curve.
“It’s quite dark for you, though,” he went on. “Using Pebble Brain to get to his dad. Playing with his heart because you think it’ll make your dad proud of you.”
Even while I felt myself bleeding, I forced my gaze steady. “You’re wrong.” My voice was flat. “Take your turn.”
Beck smiled. “Morally corrupt is my favorite version of you, you know.” And then he moved his other bishop. It captured a pawn that was blocking my king diagonally, and now there was nothing in its way. Beck’s green eyes lifted to mine. “Check.”
The deep-toned word had my heart skipping a beat, and my breath caught as I scanned the board.
His bishop was exactly in position to topple my king, but also in the perfect spot for my queen to swoop in and save the day.
I moved the piece without thinking, knocking the bishop off its square and taking it to my side.
But I didn’t realize Beck’s knight would be able to slide directly to that spot—waiting, as if he’d planned for it. He dragged his knight over to my queen, taking the piece.
My stomach sank. Without a queen, this match just got infinitely harder.
“Morally corrupt,” I scoffed, trying to appear unaffected and going back to the last statement he’d made before my heart skipped a beat.
Holding my breath, I moved my knight into place to protect the gap around my king.
“You make me sound like a villain from a movie.”
“Maybe you are.” Beck took a moment to really look at the board, and as I watched him, I could see—he did know what he was doing. He’d set up the trap for my queen almost expertly. “Do you remember I’d been crying before you came out that night?”
My next move was defensive, a small pawn shifting forward one space—stalling.
“You do.” His voice was amused. “I can see that you do.”
“You said you hadn’t been crying.” I barely registered my fingers brushing a pawn forward—automatic, meaningless.
“You saw, though. I know you did.” Beck countered instantly, cutting off my path. My king had fewer and fewer options for protection. “You must’ve thought I was pathetic, a fifteen-year-old boy out crying in a garden.”
No. That hadn’t been how I’d felt at all.
The sight of the tear tracks on his cheeks had jolted me, but not because I thought he was pathetic—but because Beck never cried.
And I’d never even pried about what had been bothering him.
I’d just swooped in, lit a few flowers on fire, and pinned the blame squarely on his back.
Beck’s eyes bounced between mine, reading my thoughts as if he could hear them aloud. They must’ve been written all over my face, loud, bold letters. R-E-G-R-E-T.
“I’d been crying because I’d been wishing things were different,” he went on in the same flippant vein. “That my parents liked me, and my only friends weren’t my alcoholic aunt and a pretty girl I only saw once a month. Perhaps you’re right, though. Perhaps I really did bring it upon myself.”
Emotion crawled up my throat, feeling like I was about to be sick. You should’ve asked, I told myself with quiet despair. You should’ve made him talk to you. You should’ve known he’d been lying. “You should’ve been honest.” Regret choked me, but the words were out there.
“I knew you would say that,” he murmured. Beck slid his final piece into place. My king had nowhere left to move, not without stepping into a space he could take. The board belonged entirely to him. “Almost down to the letter. See? I do know you well, Nell-Bell.”
And then, mockingly, he whispered, “Checkmate.”
I slowly lifted my gaze from the board, once more taking him all in.
His hood had fallen lower on the back of his head, and he’d pushed some of his hair behind his ear, as well as he could manage, though some of the few locks nearer to his temple escaped.
The darkness of his roots looked beautiful, threaded through the blond, almost as if it’d been intentionally dyed that way.
Beck wasn’t cover-of-a-magazine pretty like Carter, but painting pretty, with sharp cheekbones and an even sharper nose.
His lashes were impossibly long, fluttering with each blink. Sculpture-like. Unreal. Cold.
Underneath, like it was obscured by a nearly opaque layer of paint, I could see the boy from the garden.
Quiet, calm, but sharp when he lashed out.
Not one to laugh often, but when he did, it was a soft sound that reverberated behind my ribs.
I could recite Beck from memory, spell him like a word I knew by heart. B-E-C-K-H-A-M J-E-N-N-I-N-G-S.
But so much of him, he kept to himself. Back then, I’d known his relationship with his parents was strained, but he’d never given me specifics. He’d never told me he had no friends. He’d barely told me anything at all.
A boy I’d had a crush on, one I never thought to push deeper than what he’d always offered me.
I swallowed hard, resting my foot against the table leg beneath the chessboard. Beck’s eyelashes fluttered. “I shouldn’t have done what I did,” I said, and the words were like admitting defeat.
“Which part?” Beck tipped his head. “Kissing me in the garden, or telling our parents that I was the one who destroyed it?”
I blinked the memory away. “Both.”
“Both.” Beck echoed it distantly. His voice was low when he spoke next, and for the first time, I could hear the undercurrent of resentment in it. “You threw me away.”
What happened next happened in a blur. The rosebush had burned brighter, and then suddenly Mrs. Johnson had been there, wielding a fire extinguisher she’d seemed to have plucked up out of nowhere.
After she doused the flames, she marched over to me and wrenched me away from Beck.
I thought you were better than your sister.
I matched his stare now. “I did.”
“You threw me under the bus like I meant nothing. Like everyone else.”
“Beck was the one who’d destroyed the garden,” Mrs. Johnson had claimed while I’d cried.
My parents had been there then, looking down at me with disappointment at first, a look they’d only ever given Destelle.
But as Mrs. Johnson spoke, the expression faded into something else.
Something more manageable. Sympathy. “Beck started the fire, too. Look, he has a lighter in his hand!”
“So this is my punishment?” I asked Beck now, and despite how sick to my stomach I felt, I didn’t even blink.
I wondered if I looked steady on the outside, or like I was barely holding it together.
The latter was the truth. “Following me around, trying to ruin things with Carter. That’s why you’re trying to sabotage me? Because I hurt your feelings?”
Darkness lived in Beck’s gaze, and before, I’d thought his eyes had remained the same.
I realized then that they had changed, and were the biggest change in Beckham Jennings.
Consistent in color, worlds different in depth.
It was more than just resentment. In that moment, Beck looked at me like he hated me.
“No. I told you.” At odds with his expression, his voice was serene. “It’s because I’m bored.”
And then Beck moved.
Not a chess piece, but his foot. The table leg I’d been resting against hadn’t been the table at all, but Beck’s leg stretched out underneath the chessboard.
He moved. Slowly. Deliberately. He brushed the bare skin of my ankle, the edge of his jeans rough against my calf. My breath caught in my throat, and I should’ve pulled back, but I didn’t. Couldn’t. I was frozen solid, under his stare and his touch.
My heartbeat ticked up in my chest. I frantically fought for words to spell, but I only had one name. B-E-C-K-H-A-M J-E-N-N-I-N-G-S.
Beck kept going, the touch of his leg tracing higher on mine, the contact featherlight but searing. Goosebumps rose in the path he drew. He slid his leg up to nearly my knee before moving it lower, crawling back down the same path he’d just gone up, all while never looking away.
Never even blinking.
And I wasn’t breathing.
My gaze, unbidden, dropped to Beck’s mouth. His lips were pressed together, the top fuller than the bottom, both holding a softness his eyes did not. Morally corrupt is my favorite version of you.
Regret and something else, something more desperate, gripped me like a lifeline. Even as one corner of those plush lips tilted up, reveling in the way he unraveled me, I didn’t look away. Warmth poured into my veins, drowning me and setting me ablaze, all at the same time.
There was one word in my head. A recurring one, a taunting one that spelled itself out before I could.
I-N-E-V-I-T-A-B-L-E.
“Nellie?”
My knee banged up into the underside of the chess table, upsetting the pieces.
The row of mine that Beck had captured all fell to the floor, scattering with a tinkling sound.
I jerked around, finding Jamie a few steps into the study.
He had his book from his meeting in one hand, a notebook tucked underneath it, and his car keys in the other.
I couldn’t read the expression on his face.
Jamie picked up my fallen queen where it’d rolled across the floor. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“No interruption at all, James,” Beck told him, slipping out of his chair to retrieve the other fallen pieces. His voice was a lazy, unbothered drawl, no hint of anything that we’d just been talking about. “The game had just gotten intense, that’s all.”
My cheeks flamed.
Jamie was a master at reading the room, especially when it involved me. His eyes traced my face. “Do you want me to wait for you while you finish?” he asked, nudging up his glasses. “I can sit in one of the chairs. Or I can go sit in the car.”
“Nah, she beat me.” Beck reached across the chessboard and began putting the pieces back on their assigned squares. His nimble fingers moved easily, no trace of a tremor in sight. “She was one move away from cornering my king.”
I had not been one move away from winning.
He’d already had me in checkmate—he’d already won.
I sat still with my hands in my lap as Beck reset the board, something in my chest buzzing, willing me to speak words I didn’t know to say.
The ankle Beck’s leg had traced tingled, almost as if it’d fallen asleep.
After setting the board, Beck stretched his arms above his head like a cat. The hem of his hoodie rode up as he did so, exposing a slice of his stomach above the band of his jeans.
And I realized, in a dazed sort of way, that somewhere amidst it all, I’d forgotten Carter did not come back.
“I’d say let’s do this again,” Beck told me, reaching for the cup of iced coffee he’d gotten for me. “But I’m no good at chess. Maybe there’s a different game we can play.” His eyes danced as he took his straw between his lips, tucking it into the corner of his mouth, taking a long pull.
Not poisoned. His lips were on the same exact spot mine had been earlier. “Pass.”
Beck smirked, because he saw, too—that I’d accidentally used a word from his vocabulary. He turned and clasped my brother on the shoulder. “Jamie. Good to see ya.” Without another word—and without another glance toward me—Beck and my coffee waltzed their way back to the study’s entrance.
Where a rushing Carter Pembleton slammed into him.
Carter was taller, but thinner, and ricocheted off Beck like a bug flicking off a boulder.
Beck barely even flinched, the straw of the iced drink not even coming out of his mouth.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Carter blurted on instinct, and I could see the moment he realized who exactly he’d run into.
His expression hardened, but he still repeated, “Sorry.”
Beck didn’t say anything. Without a second glance, he strode from the study.
“I’m so sorry,” Carter said to me, his cheeks pink. He came up to the table. “I—I didn’t expect it to take that long—”
“It’s all right.” Except it didn’t feel like it.
The knowledge that he’d been out in the hall for the last ten minutes talking to Lydia—when he should’ve been in here with me—soured my stomach.
The fact that he’d left me alone in here for Beck to creep in like a predator circling its prey grated me further.
My leg still tingled. “Jamie’s book club is over, though, so we’ll head out.
You’re okay to pack up everything on your own?
” I’d lilted it like a question, but I was already stepping away.
Carter’s shoulders fell. “Of course.” And then, before I could move too far—“Don’t forget your flowers.”
Swallowing a sharp reply, I took them from his outstretched hand. Even now, when the letters were swirling in my mind, and my leg still tingled, I knew it wasn’t him I was mad at. I knew that, but I couldn’t let it go.
Jamie followed me out into the hallway, an awkward shadow over my shoulder for a few moments. “You meant Beck, then?” he asked quietly, concern scrawled across his features. “With the whole defend your honor speech?”
“No,” I lied. There was no ignoring the elephant in my life now, though, not when Jamie was too good at spotting it. “I can handle Beckham Jennings.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Not in the slightest. I planted my feet firmer into the ground as I walked, trying to shake off the pins-and-needles feeling—to shake off the ghost memory of Beck’s touch against mine. “Have a little faith.”