Chapter 35 #3
“You’re on their side already?”
I tip my head.
“They were nice to me first.”
“Traitor.”
Jade beams.
“I knew we’d get along.”
And weirdly, we do.
Fast.
Not in a cheesy soul-sister way.
In a cleaner, sharper way than that.
She asks me about Stanford, not the glossy brochure version, the real one.
About volleyball. I ask about Royal Oaks, about how she survived it, about Leo when she first met him.
She answers dryly and honestly and with just enough bite that I understand immediately why Tristan said we’d hit it off. Especially since she’s also an athlete.
At one point Leo watches us over his coffee and says, “This is either going to be a lifelong friendship or the start of a regime change.”
“Both,” Jade says.
I nod.
“Yup.”
Tristan leans back in his chair and studies the two of us like he’s realized he may have just created an alliance that will eventually be used against him.
“I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
Leo smiles.
“I know. It’s beautiful.”
Brunch arrives in waves—eggs, fruit, smoked salmon, potatoes crisped within an inch of their lives, pastries layered with far too much butter to be legal.
I’m halfway through the best croissant of my life when Leo glances at Tristan and says, more quietly now, “Seriously, though. Good game.”
Tristan looks up.
Leo shrugs one shoulder.
“We watched the whole thing. You look good with that team. Comfortable.” A pause. “I miss you at Harvard, but I get it.”
The softness in Tristan’s face at that almost undoes me again.
“Yeah,” he says. “The team has synergy.”
Jade reaches across and steals a piece of Leo’s pastry without asking. “He was annoying about it for, like, a full week.”
Leo looks offended.
“That is not true.”
“It was nine days.”
He turns back to Tristan.
“I was supportive.”
“You were dramatic.”
Jade smiles sweetly.
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
Something in my chest loosens watching them. Maybe because for all the money and privilege and prep-school legend surrounding all of them, this part is simple.
They love each other.
They fight like family.
They show up.
It matters.
And maybe Tristan feels me watching, because his hand finds my knee under the table again. This time he leaves it there.
Leo’s phone buzzes.
He glances down, and one of his brows lifts.
Then he turns the screen so Tristan can see.
My stomach knots before I even know why.
A photo.
Us.
Last night.
In the ballroom.
Not kissing, thank God.
But close enough that anyone with eyes and internet access can tell exactly what kind of story they’re looking at.
Me in the blue dress.
Tristan in black tie.
His face tipped toward mine like the rest of the room had already disappeared.
There are comments underneath. Names I don’t recognize. A lot of them.
Tristan barely glances at it before leaning back again.
“So?”
Leo laughs under his breath.
“So apparently Newport has phones.”
Jade reaches over for the screen.
“Oh, that one’s actually pretty.”
I look at Tristan.
“You’re not bothered?”
He turns to me fully, like the rest of the table vanishes.
“Why would I be bothered?”
I glance toward Leo’s phone.
“Because there are cameras. People. School. Your family. Mine. The entire West Coast has internet.”
His expression doesn’t change.
“Stella.”
The way he says my name quiets everything in me.
“I took my girl to a dance,” he says simply. “You were home before practice. Neither of us missed anything. We got our work done.” His thumb strokes once against my knee beneath the table. “I’m not apologizing for doing one thing right.”
That hits me so hard I have to look away for a second.
Jade makes a very small satisfied noise into her coffee.
Leo smirks.
“Yeah, okay. That was solid.”
I swallow and try for lightness because otherwise I’m going to do something embarrassing like cry into a pastry basket.
“Your confidence is upsetting.”
Tristan smiles without looking away from me.
“It seems to be working.”
Jade glances between us and then, because she has the instincts of a very elegant shark, stands.
“Come with me,” she says to me.
I blink.
“Where?”
“To the terrace. I need five minutes of girl talk before the men ruin brunch with sports metaphors.”
Leo lifts a hand in protest.
“I have never—”
She doesn’t even look at him.
“Sit down.”
He sits.
I bite back a laugh and let Jade tow me through the open glass doors onto the terrace, where the wind is colder and the sea louder and the privacy only partial in that expensive Newport way where everyone politely pretends not to eavesdrop.
She turns to face me and folds her arms.
“Well?”
I laugh softly.
“Well what?”
She gives me a look.
“Do you love him?”
The question lands clean.
No warning.
No cushioning.
Very Jade.
I look out at the water.
At the cliffs.
At the pale sky.
Then I look back at her.
“Yes.”
Her face softens instantly.
“Good.”
That answer catches me off guard.
“Good?”
“Yes.” She steps closer, voice lower now. “Because he’s always been dangerous when he loved something and didn’t know how to hold it right. But when he finally decides to do it right?” A small smile. “He’ll move mountains.”
I think about the plane.
The dress.
The do-over.
The room.
The waiting.
The way he touched me like something holy.
My chest aches.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “I noticed.”
Jade watches me for a second longer, then nods once like I have passed some test neither of us is going to mention again.
“Also,” she says, “you looked insane in that dress.”
I laugh, startled out of the tenderness.
“Thank you?”
“You’re welcome. He looked insane too, which was unfortunate for everyone else in attendance.”
That makes me laugh harder.
Then I say what’s been hovering at the back of my mind since last night.
“He brought me back there just to fix it.”
Jade’s expression gentles in a different way this time.
“I know.”
“You knew?”
She shrugs.
“I know him.”
A beat passes.
Then, because I don’t know how not to say it now, I confess softly, “Last night felt like a wedding night.”
Jade goes very still.
Not mocking.
Not startled.
Just listening.
When she speaks, it’s quiet.
“That means he finally understood the assignment.”
The laugh that comes out of me is shaky and half emotional.
“Apparently.”
She hooks her arm through mine and glances back through the glass at where Tristan is sitting with Leo, head bent, mouth moving, hand still stretched across the table like some part of him can’t quite stop reaching for me even when I’m three yards away.
“He’s gone for you,” she says.
“Yeah.”
She turns her face toward the sea and smiles a little.
“Good. He deserves to be.”
We go back inside a minute later to the smell of coffee and butter and men pretending they weren’t just talking about us.
Tristan looks up the second I reappear. Like he feels the room change when I walk back into it.
He stands just enough to pull out my chair when I sit, then brushes his knuckles against the back of my hand before settling beside me again.
It’s such a small thing.
It does me in anyway.
Leo watches the whole exchange with the expression of a man who is collecting evidence for future ridicule.
“I hate to interrupt,” he says, which means he absolutely doesn’t, “but your phone has gone off six times.”
Tristan pulls it from his pocket.
His expression shifts as he reads the screen.
Not badly.
Just… into that colder, more focused version of himself I’m beginning to recognize as the one he wears when the real world starts trying to intrude.
I glance at him.
“What is it?”
He looks at me, then back at the phone.
“My mother,” he says.
Jade immediately perks up.
“Oh, this should be fun.”
Leo leans back.
“Speaker?”
Tristan gives him a dead look.
“Absolutely not.”
Then he turns to me, and there’s something almost apologetic in his eyes.
“I should take this.”
I nod once.
“Go.”
He leans down, kisses my temple in the middle of brunch like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and walks a few steps away toward the windows.
Jade watches him go, then picks up her coffee and says, almost lazily, “Welcome to the next round.”
I look at her.
She smiles into her cup.
And somehow, sitting there with the ocean beyond the glass and the taste of coffee on my tongue and Tristan taking his mother’s call with my lipstick still probably somewhere on his mouth, I know exactly what she means.