Chapter Seventeen
Phoebe
For a moment, I was about to actually agree to three-card monte tonight. A quick con to get a couple hundred. Just to keep us afloat longer. It feels like the easier route to just fall into my old ways, and for Hailey, I’d jump into that slimy pool of deception again.
I’m starting to think that I can’t actually be good. That my only tether to what’s right is Hailey’s moral compass. Maybe I don’t have much of one myself.
A seagull flies at my face, disrupting my thoughts and siphoning air from my lungs. “Jesus!” I duck while Rocky cackles next to me like a wicked witch.
I glare. “It’s not funny.”
“You break a mirror this morning?” he asks as we walk along the cobbled street together. He’s superstitious in a way that’s utterly ridiculous. He hates black cats, avoids walking under ladders, and despises anyone who opens an umbrella indoors.
I call him out on it. “You can’t be superstitious when you’ve pretended to be a psychic. There’s some sort of contradiction there.”
He opens his arms like he’s asking for hugs from the world. “I’m full of contradictions.” He looks to me with a twinkle in his eyes. “Feels good not to give a fuck, Phoebe. Maybe you should try it tonight.”
He’s trying to push me to work a con tonight. He won’t succeed. I have to think about Hailey and how upset she’d be if I tarnished the one thing she’s hoping for. This fresh start.
Rocky and I are headed to the party, and this town is small enough that it’s only a twenty-minute walk to the boathouse. My mom may have scoffed at a lot of rules and laws, but drinking and driving was never one of them.
And hopefully there will be booze at this place. Though, alcohol isn’t the reason I changed my mind about the party.
“You’re like an ugly little devil on my shoulder,” I tell Rocky. I mime flicking imaginary him off my left shoulder.
He doesn’t volley back an insult. Instead, his gaze sobers on me. “Want to make a deal with the devil?”
I’m about to reject him on principle, but his earnestness gives me pause. “What kind of deal?” I wonder.
“I’ll stop trying to coerce you into your old ways if you just tell me what happened in Carlsbad.”
My face sours, and mention of Carlsbad somersaults my stomach. “No.” My pace carries me faster and harder down the cobblestone.
Rocky easily keeps up. “Phoebe—”
“We’ve been over this,” I cut him off and then stop dead in my tracks. His chest bumps up against me, and he towers a good several inches above me. I’m five-eight in these heels, not short, and he hasn’t moved a millimeter back. Ugh! With heated words and heavier breath, I snap, “I’ve left that night in the past, and I need you to do the same.”
He stares down at me, his eyes sinking into a darkness. “It was something bad—”
“I’ll make you a deal,” I interrupt him again. “First one who gets laid tonight gets one wish granted. Your wish is that you’ll get a very detailed amazing explanation of that night.”
“And your wish?”
“Is for you to drop it forever.”
He looks me over, and his gaze is a hot wave stoking my skin. At first, I think he might reject the deal, but instead, he says, “How do we even prove it?”
“Send a picture of your postcoital self.”
He gives me a harder look. “We don’t take pictures.”
A very big rule among the godmothers. Selfies aren’t taken on a whim. They’re meticulously planned and given a ton of forethought. A social media presence can be a crucial part of a fake persona. But it’s not like we’re posting these pics.
The threat of anyone scrolling through our phones and suspecting our bad deeds is low, but not nonexistent, which is partly why the rule exists.
“I’m living honestly now,” I tell him as the wind grows angrier. I hug my arms to my chest, just dressed in jeans and a short-sleeve white tee. “I can take pictures, and if you want to win, you’ll risk it.”
His jaw sets, and he glares up at the night sky.
Rocky has his hands stuffed in his leather jacket, a white button-down beneath. Business and bad boy rolled into one mildly attractive look.
Okay, mildly might be too tame. He’s Carolina Reaper hot. Pieces of his black hair skim his forehead as the wind roars. This has always been his style outside of long cons, but it’s more than Rocky’s clothes and good hair and sculpted muscles that draw flames around him. The dangerous flicker in his eyes allures me like Gretel drifting toward a gingerbread house, and even seeing the perils, I still want inside.
I always have.
It’s easy to visualize men and women drooling over him as soon as he slips into the party. He’ll have no trouble finding a one-night stand.
Why did I suggest this stupid thing? My stomach is in knots, and I wait at the precipice of a cliff for his answer.
A huge part of me hopes he’ll go back on this deal. Reject it. Be so unable to even think about hooking up with someone else when I’m in a hundred-foot vicinity. The same way my insides flip and flop at the idea of fucking another person when Rocky is so near.
It feels like betrayal.
But we’re not together.
I know. I know.
Maybe I need a physical reminder that Rocky and I aren’t together. Won’t ever be together. Something to push me away from him when everything else pushes me closer.
I’m supposed to move on in Victoria. Not backtrack to what’s familiar.
Rocky lets out a low, deep breath, and he unburies his hands from his jacket. Unmistakable is the gold ring on his wedding finger.
My lips part, stunned and baffled. “We’re supposed to be divorced,” I whisper.
He’s already tugging the ring off. “We are.”
My mind reels. “But you’re playing the part of what...? Bereft husband who wishes he could be back with his wife?”
“Not anymore,” Rocky says quietly, his eyes sinking on mine.
It hurts. I wish I could rewind.
He pockets the ring. “I wore it so the widowers would stop hitting on you.” He says it like the ring was nothing. A ploy. He was just trying to protect me from unwanted attention.
Okay.
Scratch the rewind. Press play.
Except, with the way we stare into each other, the emotion pooling between us is deeper than his words. I’m sixteen in the backseat of a Lamborghini with the son of a plastic surgeon. Parked at sunset with ocean views. This guy was twenty-one. Too old to be with me, but he didn’t know my age.
He didn’t ask. When he kissed me, I felt nothing.
I wasn’t even there.
Until a fist banged on the window, and I jolted.
Rocky appeared, needing a hand with his car’s dead battery. He took over the con, but he wasn’t supposed to key the Lambo at the end.
To think there is zero feeling in what we’ve done and what we do—that’d be the greatest lie we tell ourselves. And even though we’re in the business of lying to others, we’re usually truthful with ourselves, so I’m positive Rocky has acknowledged the messy, unwieldly emotion inside our jobs.
Inside us.
The wind settles down, and I uncross my arms, making the first movement in what feels like an eon.
It wakes him from a similar stupor. “You want to do this. Fine.” Rocky extends his hand. “First one to get laid wins.”
Everything is tilted. Wrong.
I shake his hand anyway.