Chapter 21 #3
But Thad was looking at me as if I were the only girl on the terrace. Not Katherine’s cousin. Not the scholarship girl hidden inside designer hand-me-downs. Not someone being held up academically by the girl sitting ten feet away. Just me. Or the version of me he believed he saw.
I wanted that too much.
“You’re very confident,” I said.
“I get told that a lot.”
“That wasn’t a compliment.”
“It sounded like one from you.”
I smiled despite myself.
He moved closer, but not enough to trap me.
I looked toward the outdoor sofa. Katherine was watching us. Even across the terrace, even through gold light and laughter and moving bodies, I saw her face clearly.
For one second, guilt moved through me so sharply I almost stepped away.
Then someone inside called my name, and Thad touched my wrist lightly, and the guilt became quieter beneath the rush of being wanted.
He kissed me near the railing with the party glowing behind us and the whole future opening falsely at my feet. His mouth came down warm and sure, the kind of kiss I had tasted from boys my own age, but never like this. Those had been quick and clumsy, all nerves and half-finished pressure.
Thad was older, confident, and he kissed like he already knew exactly how a girl would melt under him.
His tongue slid against mine, slow and deep, and his hands moved without hesitation.
One palm cupped my breast through the thin silk of my dress, thumb brushing the nipple until it tightened.
The other hand slid lower, gripping my ass hard enough that I felt every finger press into the fabric and pull me flush against him.
Heat rushed through me fast and sharp. He tasted faintly like champagne.
When I opened my eyes, Katherine was gone.
I found her upstairs, twenty minutes later, in one of Camila’s guest bathrooms, sitting on the closed toilet seat with her champagne glass untouched in both hands.
“Katherine.”
She did not look up.
I closed the door behind me. The music downstairs blurred into a dull pulse through the walls.
“I’m so sorry.”
“No, you’re not, Céline .”
The words were quiet.
I leaned back against the door, suddenly unable to move closer.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
“You never mean for anything to happen.”
I flinched.
She looked up then, and her eyes were not crying, which somehow made her look more hurt.
“You just stand there, and people choose you, and then you act surprised.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No,” she said, with a small brittle laugh. “It really isn’t.”
“I didn’t know he would—”
“Yes, you did.”
I stopped. Because she was right. Maybe I had not known for certain, but I had known enough. I had felt Thad’s attention shift toward me and chosen not to redirect it. I had seen Katherine’s face and let myself be kissed anyway.
“You liked him,” I said, hating how weak the words sounded.
Katherine stared at me. “That was the point.”
I looked down. My shoes were Katherine’s too. Silver heels she had worn once and decided were uncomfortable. Everything about me in that room had passed through her hands before becoming mine. Even the boy, almost.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
She stood and placed the untouched champagne on the sink counter.
“It’s fine.”
“Katherine.”
“I said it’s fine.”
Her face had already closed. That was the part I hated most. Not her anger. Her retreat. The way she could disappear behind her own expression while still standing three feet away from me.
“I won’t see him again,” I said.
Katherine looked at me then, and for a second I thought she might ask me to promise. She didn’t. Maybe she already knew better.
“No,” she said softly. “You will.”
I wanted to deny it. Instead, silence answered for me.
Katherine laughed once under her breath, small and wounded.
Then she walked past me and opened the bathroom door.
Downstairs, someone shouted for Céline.
Katherine paused in the hallway without looking back. “You should go,” she said. “They’re looking for you.”
Then she left me standing there in borrowed shoes, borrowed silk, borrowed life, with Thad’s champagne still warm on my tongue and my best friend’s hurt sitting heavy in the room behind her.
* * *
Two weeks later, Thad asked me out properly. Dinner in town. A car was sent to the estate. Flowers were delivered to the cottage because he thought that was romantic and did not understand what it meant for my mother to receive a bouquet worth more than our weekly groceries.
Katherine found the flowers before I did. She stood in the cottage doorway holding the card between two fingers.
“You’re going?”
I looked at the white roses, then at her.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I can say no.”
“You won’t.”
The hurt had become quieter now. More controlled. More dangerous in its patience.
“I don’t want this to ruin us,” I said.
Katherine looked at me for a long time.
Then she smiled. Soft, brief and completely false.
“It won’t.”
And because I needed to believe her, I did.
That was how Thad Rodriguez became my boyfriend. I did not love him, and Katherine forgave me publicly, but Céline Martin had learned by eighteen that wanting things was easier if you stopped asking who they had belonged to first.