Chapter Thirty
Phoebe
A lump lodges in my throat as I watch Rocky depart like a dark, ominous cloud. Every part of me craves to run after him, to call him back, to share the same torrid air. But I shouldn’t want those things.
It’ll only fuel the town’s obsessions with this warped love triangle—and to be frank, it’s already chaos.
Judgy eyes.
Gossipy whispers.
They still linger after Rocky is gone.
Face hot, I take a short breath. Within this chaos, I’ve gained a semblance of a social standing that I can wedge my feet on. Jake is my boyfriend. People are starting to sympathize with me, and I’ve even been summoned to a future Koning family dinner. Which I’m told is the equivalent of being handed a golden ticket to the chocolate factory.
But being summoned feels nothing like a warm welcome. I’m expecting to be grilled and eviscerated. Jake’s mother has been forty feet away all day and hasn’t even said boo to me.
Luckily, that’s the coldest invitation I’ve received. Mrs. Kelsey asked me to an afternoon tea with her and her twenty-two-year-old daughter. “You’d make lovely friends,” she told me. I’m aware that I’m just being used because of my proximity to Jake, and being one degree away from town royalty has its perks.
Those benefits make it easier to keep up the charade and sink into my natural role of pretending. At the festival, I’ve maintained full focus on Jake.
Until now.
I’m watching Rocky return to the pumpkin carving table by Hailey and Oliver, and my stomach somersaults while my heart volleys in my chest. It’s a fabricated love triangle, isn’t it? Then why do I feel like there is a real loser? Why don’t I want that person to be Rocky?
It’s impossible to look away from him, even as I sense Jake’s intense side-eye on me.
“You still have feelings for him,” Jake says under his breath.
I’ve always had feelings for him. I punt-kick that thought away and avert my eyes to my empty cup. All my apple cider was chugged in one anxious gulp.
Off my silence, his attention travels across the festival. “Come this way...” Jake brings me around the fountain, closer to the cast-iron swan spurting water, and I realize he chose this spot because of the ambient noise. The sound of splashing drowns out our conversation from possible eavesdroppers.
Instinctively, I want to glance at Rocky, but I force myself to concentrate on Jake. What every awesome fake girlfriend would do.
His fingers glide against my elbow before he gently takes my hand in his. It’s featherlight affection that I should try to naturally lean into, but I’m a little stiff. I can see he’s doing it for show anyway. And he’s good at it.
He’s good at pretending. At lying. At hiding something.
It unnerves me that I don’t know more. That information is gridlocked behind a wall that I can’t reach.
Together, we take a seat on the fountain’s brick edge, and most of the town’s gossipmongers stroll away like the show is over. Nothing to see here, people. I swish my cup but remember it’s empty.
“What would it take to get over him?” Jake suddenly asks me.
I can’t help but laugh. “If I had that answer, don’t you think I would’ve gotten over him already?”
He’s quiet until he says, “You think fake dating me will help?”
It hasn’t yet. “Do you hope it does?” I question back.
“Maybe,” he answers plainly.
“How indecisive of you, Jake.”
“Maybe yes,” he corrects. “Is that better?”
“Maybe,” I tease.
He almost laughs. Again, I swish my empty drink. He leans over to pour some of his own apple cider in my cup.
I mutter, “Thanks.” He’s sweet. Yet, my guards haven’t collapsed to the ground.
He sips his apple cider, staring at little twin siblings with tiger and fairy face paint. They’re trying to play with an oversized chess set while their oblivious parents gab with adult friends.
“I just don’t want Rocky to interfere with us,” he admits, his gaze flitting to me. “This arrangement is helping me more than you know.”
I frown deeply. “There’s more in it for you than pissing off your mom?”
“Yeah.” He takes a tight breath before saying, “Her name was Natalie Betchel. My last girlfriend.”
I watch his brows crinkle at what I assume is a painful memory.
After a beat, he says, “She was stunning, top of her class at Brown, and played doubles tennis on the weekends at the club. She was perfect for my family.” He stares off in a faraway haze. “Every girlfriend I’ve had, my mother loved. Obsessively.”
I can relate. Kind of. It’s not like Rocky and I have ever really been together, but my mother’s obsession is there.
I stay quiet. And he fills the silence. “I was with Natalie for two years, and my mother insisted she come to every family meal, attend every charity function, every single thing that warranted an arm hooked to mine or a stand-in for my absence. In my mother’s eyes, she was nothing more than a malleable thing.”
My stomach drops. Okay, my mother is not the same. She wouldn’t treat my significant other like a chess piece... unless they were a mark for a job.
“Why not just tell Natalie to stop listening to your mom?” I wonder.
“I did do that.” His forehead is pleated in distress like he’s traveling back to that time and place. “A thousand times, I did. But she wanted to please my family. All my girlfriends have always wanted to please my family. It wasn’t long before Natalie’s dreams of being a corporate attorney were traded in for ball gowns and afternoon tea. Then my brothers invited her to their parties and after-parties and yacht trips. And I saw her wasting away under three a.m. nights filled with coke and cashed-in dreams. Being around my family any longer would have either killed her or changed her beyond recognition, so I broke things off.”
I’m not surprised by the move, but I still ask, “Even though you loved her?”
He stares at his cup. “If I loved her more, I would have never let her enter that world. My family... they can be...” He struggles for a word before he says, “parasitic.” He winces. “I’ve watched so many innocent things slowly decay in their presence. And they keep pressuring me to find someone new to date. I’m worried any longer and my mother will just matchmake me with the first girl she finds.”
It clicks. “And you don’t want that new innocent person to become another Natalie.”
“Or worse,” he breathes out.
“So you’re dating me instead.” I nod along, since I can connect with his intent. “You’re protecting a bystander from walking into the insidious webs of your family. So... I’m like your shield.”
He smiles at the analogy. “If you’re my shield, then I’m your crown.” He brings the apple cider to his mouth again. “Here to grant you access into the kingdom.” He swigs the last of his drink.
I pour mine back in his cup. “According to you, it’s filled with vipers.”
“I think you can handle yourself.” He looks me over. “I don’t think you’re easily malleable, Phoebe.” Rocky believes I am. He thinks my mother has been manipulating me. No... there’s just no way. It’s still difficult to really make sense of that possibility.
I look up, just as Jake leans in closer. He smooths a strand of my hair behind my ear. Out of the corner of my eye, I suddenly realize we’re being watched by Claudia’s friends. I’m more caught off guard that I’ve slipped and forgotten.
“Dating you beats the alternative,” he continues in thought, his blue eyes tracing mine with softer affection. He’s not too bad at pretending.
“The alternative is what?” I ask. “Being a bachelor forever?”
He nods. “Which I would do, if I had to.”
I almost open up and divulge that I, too, always believed I’d be single forever. Living the bachelorette life. But I’d have to explain my upbringing to really dig into those weeds. So I just rest into his side like a real girlfriend. Someone who can have him.
“I need this to work,” he breathes, his arm around my waist. “Us.” I hear a tinge of desperation. He wants this badly. I’m a tool to cutting his mom off from tormenting some other woman who could become Mrs. Jake Waterford. And maybe this is my way of doing some good without fully shedding the things I love. Pretending. Deceiving. The art of a ruse. Only the outcome isn’t a boatload of cash but protecting a girl from being Claudia Waterford bait.
Not going to lie, it feels kind of nice to be Jake’s shield.
Still, there’s one problem.
“I want this to work, too, but you can’t keep fighting with Rocky.” I lift my weight off Jake and face him more, seeing his scowl. “I’m serious.”
He tries to lighten up, but his face pinches painfully. “I don’t like him.”
“Yeah, no duh. The entire town has seen that.”
He downs the last of the cider in an aggravated gulp. “The more you defend him, the more I just think—”
“What?” I prickle. “That I’m sticking up for my ex because I’m a battered lover who’ll keep apologizing for his abusive behavior?”
His eyes sink into mine. “What should I believe?”
“That he’s never laid a hand on me. He constantly thinks about me and my feelings over his own, and he’s willing to be a town pariah if it means I’m in a better social standing. He’s only following me around because he doesn’t trust you, and considering we’re in some bizarre fake dating scheme, I don’t blame him.”
Jake cools off a bit, and I continue, “If you keep provoking him, he might accidentally blow our cover.” Not totally true, but Jake did insinuate that he was worried about him. “So it’d be better to squash the animosity now and establish... something... less hostile between you two.”
Jake slowly begins to nod.
I try not to act like his acceptance is a defibrillator to my chest. I pick my jaw off the ground. That was too easy.
“Yeah,” he says softly. “I don’t want him to ruin this.” He motions between me and him.
“Okay... good.” I’m ready for this pseudo-war to be over. “You... do you realize that means actually having a civil conversation?”
“As long as he meets me halfway, I think I can work it out,” he says, his gaze drifting over my features. His fingers skate along the top of my head, and he plucks another fiery orange leaf from my hair.
Those damn leaves. All day they’ve been attacking me, but it’s done a bang-up job of amplifying our romance. I smile at him, my stomach tossing in a weird way.
He whispers, “You hate that, don’t you?”
“It’s the featherlight touches,” I say, still smiling. “I’m more of a hair-grab kinda girl.”
“I think if I grabbed your hair in public someone would tackle me.”
I tilt my head. “Who said anything about doing it in public?”
Why the fuck did I just say that?
It’s a flirt. A come-on. Is it just so natural for me to lean into this like I’m on some sort of “seduce” setting that I can’t control? He’s searching my gaze for more, like he’s trying to piece together how real that was.
I don’t know.
I don’t even know.
Not real! My head is screaming.
I nervously try to tuck flyaway hairs behind my ears. “He’s not a bad guy.” Back to Rocky. Yes, I’m rerouting the Jake & Phoebe Express back to him—even if it means skidding off the train tracks—but luckily, Jake’s face doesn’t sour at the mention of my ex. “The friends Rocky does have, he’ll do anything for. He’s that kind of guy.”
Jake stares off again, lost in deep thought for a quiet second. He tips the cider to his mouth, forgetting he drank the rest, but that breaks his stupor. Now I’m wondering what the hell is churning in the brain of Jake Waterford.
If only mind reading were actually a thing.
“Jake!” Ms. Davenport suddenly swoops into our sphere, breaking our intimate and quiet chat near the fountain. Her manufactured congenial smile and emptied mimosa are putting me on my best girlfriend behavior.
I hold on to Jake’s elbow, dutiful and lovesick.
Jake slips on Persol sunglasses and wears a warm smile. “Ms. Davenport. How’s the festival treating you?”
“Oh, perfect.” Her curiosity zips from him to me, back to him. “Aren’t you two looking serious.”
Jake smiles down at me. “We are. Aren’t we, babe?”
“Mm-hmm.” I grin up at him, forcing myself not to search for Rocky and hoping beyond hope that everyone buys our romantic fa?ade.
He naturally slides his fingers along my temple and back behind my ear, the touch soothing and genuine. His eyes carry the same calming sentiments. I’d be a bigger liar if I said the motion wasn’t comforting. Maybe he’s trying to ease me into this situation where I need to be a fortress against his family.
A shield.
His shield.
Let’s hope the crown he’s granting me shines like the motherfucking sun.