Nineteen
‘BET SHE’S LOVING THIS.’
Though I know damn well that I’m the she in question, I don’t look up – though my teammates are, in fact, right, I don’t give them the satisfaction of knowing just how much I’m loving the shouts echoing around the changing room.
Rookies. You’re supposed to air your romantic grievances in a supply closet or in the back parking lot that only staff use. Everyone knows sound carries in here.
Well, evidently, not everyone. Sienna and Ben obviously did not get the memo. Either they don’t realize that the single layer of lockers separating them from the rest of the team is not all that soundproof of a barrier, or they’re too incensed with each other to care.
He was late picking her up this morning.
Didn’t bring her breakfast. She played the radio too loud on the drive here.
She spoke too much and blurred his focus.
He got our relay off to a slow start. Her strokes were out of sync.
He did this, and she did that, they both fucking sucked, but you don’t hear me kicking up a fuss, and I was the one who carried those slackers to victory all on my damn lonesome.
‘What the fuck is your deal?’ I hear Ben spit.
Oh, God help him if he was using that tone with me, I briefly think, before realizing that, actually, he has. He used to all the damn time. And like Sienna does now, I just stood there and let him. Except I remember finding his anger vaguely amusing – Sienna most definitely does not.
‘We won,’ Ben points out, earning a vicious laugh from Sienna, a noise so at odds with that pretty blonde exterior.
‘Because of her, right?’
I feel every eye in the room swing to me.
‘What does that have to do with anything?’
Yeah, I agree with Ben, and the entire universe trembles. What do I have to do with this?
‘I saw how you were looking at her.’
‘You sound insane, Sienna.’
Every woman in the room hisses through their teeth.
‘Good job, Daniela,’ comes a poor imitation of Ben’s voice. I only have to fight the urge to laugh for a second – it’s soon chased away by half a dozen accusatory glares, as if no one witnessed me steadfastly ignoring the words my ex threw at me. ‘What was that, huh?’
‘I was just being nice.’
That swallowed laugh finally escapes. I can’t help it. Ben. Nice. I snicker again.
‘We’re a team, Sienna,’ he adds, and, God, that condescension makes even my skin crawl.
It makes Sienna spew a funny noise. A ringing, metallic thump proceeds it, and if I had to guess, I’d say Ben just got pretty damn intimate with a locker, courtesy of the latest entry to the long list of women he’s pissed off.
He curses loudly. A moment later, in my peripheral vision, I watch him stomp into view like a disgruntled toddler.
I don’t need to see him properly to know he’s red-faced, practically foaming at the mouth.
I hear his huffing and puffing, I feel a scowl pass over me, and then the door bangs off the wall, signaling his exit.
A bout of stuttered sniffles announce Sienna, soon drowned out by soft, sorrowful croons.
As everyone rushes to crowd her, I stand and turn my back, giving myself the freedom to roll my eyes while they fuss and fret and offer baseless, vague assurances that everything will be just fine, that they’re made for each other.
The dramatics grate on me. Turn me bitter, because no one ever fussed over me.
I could be standing in front of them, bawling my damn eyes out, and none of them would give even the tiniest of fucks.
We’re not friends, but we’re a team. There should be something between us, some kind of bond, shouldn’t there?
Why can’t I have that here? Why did I need a fake boyfriend and a shot at his fucking friends to find some semblance of that?
So lost in my bitterness, I don’t notice the room clearing out until it’s just me and one other person. Someone who hasn’t quite gotten enough attention from everyone else, apparently, so she feels the need to demand mine.
‘Daniela?’
I don’t turn around. I don’t straighten up from where I’m hunched over my duffel bag, wrestling my damp towel into it. I don’t spare the voice I recognize, nor the person I know it belongs to, anything more than the energy it takes to bark a cool ‘No.’
The woman who fucked my boyfriend behind my back actually has the audacity to sigh at me. ‘I just wanna talk.’
‘And I just don’t give a fuck.’
‘Please, Dani. Five minutes, that’s all I want.’
I repeat myself, but it doesn’t seem to penetrate that mop of blonde hair.
Determined footfalls bring her closer. A hand on my shoulder makes her impossible to ignore.
A shocked expression makes me fucking laugh when I promptly bat her away before turning to face her of my own accord.
‘Why now, huh? Why do you wanna talk to me? Why are you now suddenly struck with regret when it’s been months?
Is it because you actually feel guilty or because you feel like a fucking idiot because it’s already gone to shit? ’
‘I do feel guilty,’ she argues, she can argue all day long, I’m never going to believe her. Because guilty people don’t follow up their professions of guilt with ‘But.’
I snort.
‘I didn’t mean to hurt you,’ Sienna continues, batting those big blue eyes at me as if I’m susceptible to shit like that. ‘It’s just . . . the heart wants what the heart wants, y’know? You get that, right?’
Oh, she has got to be shitting me. ‘Funnily enough, no. I don’t.’
‘But it worked out for you. You’re with Heath now.’
‘You don’t get to take credit for that. You don’t get to assuage your guilt because I ended up happy while you got the short end of the fucking stick.’
‘Jesus, Dani, I’m trying to apologize.’
‘That’s hilarious, considering I haven’t actually heard a sorry leave your mouth, have I?’
‘I’m—’
‘No, Sienna. No. I don’t care. I don’t want to hear it. I’m not gonna be the balm to your guilty soul, I am not your repentance. I am nothing to you, and you are nothing to me.’
‘Well, obviously you do care or you wouldn’t be so mad.’
‘I care about what you did. I care that you humiliated me, and you kept fucking doing it, and you got a kick out of it too. I care that everyone lied and snuck around and laughed at me. I care that I wasted two years of my life with a loser. But I don’t care that it was you. I don’t care about you.’
‘Don’t you think you’re being a little unreasonable? We weren’t even friends.’
My head drops, shaking as I chuckle. There it is. Her absolution. We weren’t friends, so it doesn’t matter. Ben and I weren’t happy, so it doesn’t matter. They’re hearts fucking aligned or whatever, so I don’t matter.
Maybe they’re right. Maybe I am being unreasonable, maybe I am being dramatic, maybe I should put a pin in it, get over it, expel that lingering taint of betrayal that flares every time I have to be in a room with them, with anyone who knew about them and helped them hide it.
Or maybe I can feel however the fuck I want about the monumentally shitty thing that happened to me.
Slinging my bag across my shoulders, I cling tight to the strap with both hands as I look Sienna dead in the eyes.
‘I never did anything to you. I never picked on you or singled you out or treated you any differently than I treat anyone else. Yeah, we weren’t friends, but I never did anything to you.
And you did the worst fucking thing to me and then, when everyone made me the villain, you let that happen too. ’
At least she has the decency to flinch.
I, on the other hand, lack the kind of decency that would probably stop me from bumping into her as I stride past – and from throwing something just a little shitty over my shoulder on my way out the door. ‘If you really wanna make it up to me, tell your boyfriend to leave me the fuck alone.’
I linger just long enough to know that the comment hit home exactly the way I intended before letting the door swing shut behind me.
With a groan that comes from my damn bones, I drag my hands over my head before linking them at the base of my neck. Face tilted toward the high ceilings, I groan again. Silently, I ask if the universe is ever planning on giving me a single day off from its fuckery.
The universe laughs, right before the last voice I ever want to hear trills my name.
Marisol Castro Williams is many, many things.
Widow. Stepmother.
Terrifying.
Not visually. Visually, she’s anything but. Lithe and willowy and sun-kissed, with bright green eyes and long, luscious hair and the kind of ethereal beauty that has heads turning and the sun shining and birds fucking chirping, that hasn’t faded even a little bit with age.
She isn’t my brand of terrifying. She isn’t surly and scowly and mean. No, her terror is specific. Her terror tends to extend to only a couple of targets.
Her stepson, occasionally.
Her stepdaughter, almost always.
‘Mari,’ I choke, as I feel myself shrink at least an inch. ‘What’re you doing here?’
She huffs, already offended. ‘You haven’t been answering my calls, so I had to track you down. Your brother said you had a meet today.’
God, I fear what else my brother might’ve had to say. ‘You were watching?’
A wrinkled nose answers that question before she does. ‘I caught the end of your last race.’
And . . . nothing. No congratulations. No good job. Just tight-lipped mutual discomfort.
‘I thought we could go for dinner.’
I have plans, is on the tip of my tongue, but it never gets the chance to spill.
An emphatic, flinch-inducing ‘Mari’ cuts me off. Right before my literal worst nightmare develops before my very eyes.
Straight-backed and smirking, Ben saunters up to my stepmother and wraps her in a hug she doesn’t hesitate to return. She exclaims and croons and pinches his fucking cheeks, remarking on his handsomeness, suddenly giving just enough of a shit about swimming to comment on his prowess.
‘Come eat with us,’ she insists, wrapping herself around his arm and holding him close, with more enthusiasm than she’s ever shown me. ‘We can go to that place we went to last month.’