Chapter 15 Check #2
I don’t need eyes to recognize Faust’s deep, quiet voice.
If I wasn’t about to lose it, I might be embarrassed that he found me like this—I probably will be, later.
But I lean into his hand, and his wide palm is the only reason my lungs are stable enough to work.
His fingertips bracing me against a collapse.
He knew I’d be here, at this horrible party, as that horrible man’s date, and he came. He’s here.
Tears burn my eyes at how relieved I feel. “Sorry, fuck. I’m so sorry. I’m not…” I wave a placating hand in front of myself. See? I can wiggle my fingers! “I’m okay, actually. Looks way worse than it is.”
“You need to sit down.” He does not sound placated.
“I’m good. I’ll be dancing again in like two minutes.”
“Cat.”
Wow, since when was talking this nauseating? “Maybe I could sit.”
There aren’t any chairs outside. Faust realizes this, too, and makes the quietest noise of frustration.
Then he strides to one of the tall, blocky cocktail tables, picks it up, and flips it on its side.
He helps me onto my makeshift bench, standing sort of in front of me, kind of beside me.
Mostly blocking the light from the door.
If someone came outside, right now, they might think he was out here on his own.
I peer up at him, and the concern on his face makes my heart thump. “Thank you,” I whisper.
His jaw tics. Then he nods, his eyes shifting away. “What did he do to you?”
Anger trembles around the edges of his voice, and I press a hand over my chest to keep this stupid drumming quiet. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Then what was it like?” His fingers slip from his pants pocket and curl into a fist, one at a time, then uncurling.
It reminds me of how a small, angry animal needs its entire body to breathe.
“I’m not…” He stops, and when I look up, I realize he caught me looking at his fist. He uncurls it for a final time. “I’m not going to do anything.”
But I want him to. I’ve been alone for so long, doing what I do, that Faust’s righteous anger on my behalf is hitting me like a drug.
I want how much he cares. I want his unapologetic intelligence, his vigilant silence, his protection.
I want him, and I’m scared. My heart is full.
If Faust is here, taking up space, who is he pushing out?
“I’m—I told you.” I force the words out. “I’m dating him. He just asked me.”
His expression doesn’t change. “Okay.”
“I’m here for Bernard.”
“I know.”
“Not you.”
He inhales sharply. “I know.”
“So stop. You’re not going to save me. You’re not going to, to get inside my head. I don’t want to think about you anymore.” I stand, my hand still pressed protectively over my chest. “Please.”
The last word kicks something loose in me. I feel a tear run down my cheek, and it’s so deeply embarrassing, to be the woman at a party crying over a man. Because no one else sweeps in to help her like I do.
Faust watches me rub the tear away, his throat bobbing. His eyes shift between mine. Waiting. Then, not waiting.
“Cat,” he says in that low voice of his, thunder over a rolling hill, bouncing around the dips and getting caught in the grass. “Cat, I know.”
For a second, I just look at him looking at me. My emotions draining out from me like I’ve been uncorked. “Know… what?”
“I know what you’re doing.”
My stomach plummets. “I don’t know what you’re—”
“Arcadia.”
That’s all he has to say.
I cover my mouth, emptied out. Shocked.
My name.
He knows my name.
Faust watches my reaction carefully, like he’s been biding his time for this.
But there isn’t any amusement on his face.
This isn’t Gamemaster Faust, having fun with my head.
“I looked at everything. Everything you’ve put online.
Your followers. Accounts you’ve had before.
Tagged photos,” he murmurs. And for as carefully restrained as his words are, there’s an undercurrent to his voice, too.
A pulse there, thrumming, like a gas leak whistling in a bad made-for-TV movie, right before the house explodes.
“I found one, from your friend Renata. Tagging you and your secret account. You were good. Really. Pulling your name-change petition from the internet. Ignoring those rumors so they got buried. I had to dig to find somewhere else you’d used the same username twice.
But—Jesus, Cat, you forgot to delete your chess profile. ”
My… chess profile. I haven’t logged on there in years. Since I moved, I’m sure. It’d have my old name on the account.
Faust looked through thirty thousand of my followers, all their photos, to find my one mistake?
Then he would’ve found more than just me and Renata.
“Faust. Please. My family thinks the name change is a modeling thing, okay? And it was, sort of. So you can’t…
” Momentarily, the last dregs of my self-preservation instinct debate slipping around him and running for the door. “Please don’t tell my family.”
But he’s taking a step closer, his words sticking me to the ground. His face is open and earnest and Faust and kind. “I’m not going to tell anyone. If you’re—if you’re really here just to fuck with him.”
“What else would I be doing?”
It’s only a crumb of the whole truth. Confession shavings.
It’s enough to make him start talking faster, though, and that’s disorienting.
Nervous Faust. “I thought you were working with him, to fuck me over, or—I don’t know.
I saw you at his wedding, then you’re here, and he’s gone.
I thought you were trying to ruin this year for me. ”
“I’m not. I…” His promise from a moment ago processes for me. “You don’t want to tell anyone?”
The air between us is charged, audible static running from him to me, and it’s like I can hear Faust’s brain whirling with this confirmation. He watches me. Carefully.
Something clicks behind his eyes.
“I want to help you.”
I don’t move. Staring, frozen. And then, like a train crashing into a brick wall, I understand what he just said.
“You’re—” I stop. Blink. “You’re joking. You’d help me break Bernard’s heart?”
“I would,” he says, and I can tell he’s serious.
He usually is, so it isn’t a stretch, but there’s an honesty to his face.
They don’t often make faces like Faust’s.
He’s the kind of person you look at when life explodes around you: he’s steady, stable, and clear about his feelings even when he’s trying not to let you see his opinions.
As much as I hate when he turns his staring on me, I do like that clarity about him.
Negative emotions pass through his guardrails like water through fabric.
You look at him, and you know if you’re in danger or not.
And I don’t think I’m in danger.
Nevertheless, I feel like I’m falling down a long and mostly abandoned well. “No. You don’t even know who hired me. Or my plan. That’s… no. I don’t need your help.”
Faust’s mouth curves down. “Do you want it?”
“I just said—”
“Do you want it?”
How he says want reminds me of the things I’m trying not to think about. I lick my lips, searching for the next exit sign to slip out. But there isn’t one. This time, I don’t know where else to run.
And he seizes on my silence. “Do you think you’re alone in this?
” Faust’s eyes flash to my mouth, then lower.
He’s looking at my necklace again, just like the second time we’d met.
“Do you think it’s been easy, seeing only pieces of you?
Knowing that you’re this brilliant, fucking unreal woman, and you’re hiding her from me?
I can’t get you out of my head and I didn’t even know if you were real. ”
My skin prickles like he’s reached over, found a loose thread hanging from me, and torn me down the seam. Brilliant. Me. The real me. This has to be another game to him, and I shouldn’t let this force between us push me into saying—“You don’t mean that.”
Faust drags in an impossibly long breath. “You don’t know how much I do.”
That’s the problem. I don’t understand him at all, and I understand everyone.
My fingers shake, knees trembling. There has to be somewhere else I can go.
I can’t let him stop me, here. And I try to explain that, but I don’t know how to talk as openly and honestly as he does.
You’re moving very quickly, and I need space to think about this isn’t a sentence in my vocabulary.
Neither is I have to go back inside to the man who thinks I’m falling in love with him.
So I don’t say any of that, and I just go.