10. Court
CHAPTER 10
COURT
Day 9—On the way to China
Standings after leg 4, New Zealand
1. Kick Asspen (Treva and Boyd)
2. Alaska Girls (Stephanie and Marcail)
3. Old Bay (Haylee and Kadeeja)
4. A Team (Mitchell and Kennedy)
5. Us
6. Bombshells (Gianna and Alexis)
7. Wise Guys (DeAngelo and Big Mike)
8. Niles (Padma and Bobby)
*Non-elimination leg
T he opposite of jet lag must be jet fuel because I’m wide awake while everyone else is zonked on the plane. I blame it on restless legs and incessant thoughts about those last few minutes in the jump pod when I’d braced myself to be nailed in the balls and instead had taken a hit square in the chest.
It’s worth mentioning that I’ve touched Hartley since the race began—it’s impossible not to given our proximity and requirement to participate in challenges—but those were static-charged micro-zaps compared to the full-blown, fork-in-an-outlet, high-voltage hug she gave me.
I’m assuming the extra layers I wore muffled my pounding heart because she didn’t give any indication she heard or felt it. I certainly did. Still do. Without thinking, I press the heel of my hand to my chest and rub, something I’ve apparently done so much today that Treva asked if I injured myself and whipped out her travel pack of essential oils. I politely declined because there’s no cure for this. Only more aching that, from personal experience, should go away in a few years.
No big deal.
With a heavy sigh, I close my eyes and try to get comfortable. New Zealand was a non-elimination leg so instead of checking in and having a twelve-hour break, Paul gave us our next clue and told us to keep racing. Now we’re on a half-empty flight to Japan, which means Hartley and I got to spread out—she took the window seat and I took the aisle. I guess having full access to both armrests and some much-needed distance from her are a decent tradeoff for feeling like an oversized sardine.
A quiet but firm, “We need to talk,” from Gianna interrupts my thoughts.
“Pretty sure the only thing I need is twelve more inches of legroom. Also, I’m sleeping.”
“What a coincidence, that’s exactly what I came to talk to you about.”
“The tragic lack of legroom on airplanes?” I ask, eyes still closed.
Fabric brushes my arm and then I hear the click of a seat belt. “No, you sleeping. More specifically, with whom.”
So much for attempting to relax.
I roll my head to the right and find Gianna in the previously vacant seat across the aisle, elbow on the armrest and chin cupped in her hand. The dark cabin keeps her expression hidden, and her tone doesn’t give any clues as to why she’s asking, so I’m not sure if this is the beginning of a proposition or an inquisition.
Not that it changes my answer either way.
“I’m not sleeping with anyone.”
“I didn’t mean currently, but that’s good to know. I’m talking about six years ago.”
Okaaay , this took an unexpected turn. “You want to know about my sex life when I was in college?”
“Before the last leg started, Hartley said you cheated on her and rubbed your new girlfriend in her face. You don’t strike me as that kind of guy, though, so I wanted to hear your version while the cameras aren’t rolling.”
Every interaction I’ve had with the Bombshells has been genuine...also flirty, but genuine, nonetheless. Gianna asking about this off-camera is further proof I made the right decision when choosing who to form an alliance with.
I release a long breath and run my palms over my thighs. Hartley’s still curled up asleep against the window and I literally have nothing else to do, so why not?
“She’s talking about her art showcase right before her graduation. I didn’t cheat and she was never even supposed to see me that night.”
A loud bang jolts me awake and I whack my shin on the coffee table.
“Motherfucker,” I mutter, rubbing my leg with one hand and fumbling around for my phone with the other. I find it sandwiched between the couch cushion and armrest, a blurry 2:49 p.m. staring back at me. That makes what...four hours of sleep?
Fuck.
I’m debating whether to take a piss or close my eyes again when someone knocks on the door. Pounds, actually. With a heavy sigh, I push off the couch and trudge across the living room.
“It’s about time,” a lady says when I open the door.
I wince against the blazing daylight and attempt to focus on the person.
“Are you going to invite me in or just stand there like a doofus?”
Wait. “Ella?” I blink several times. When I saw her during Christmas break, her dark blond hair was to her waist. The person on my doormat has jet black hair that stops in a sharp angle at her chin. But damn if she doesn’t sound just like my younger sister. I blink again.
“I was going to surprise the family next week when the official announcement comes out, but then you went and had a personal crisis.” She pushes large sunglasses to the top of her head and grins. “You’re looking at the lead role for Bargain Assassin . A wig would be nearly impossible, so I embraced my inner Simone and went to the salon.”
It takes my sluggish brain a few seconds to process what she just said. “You got the part? El, that’s awesome.” I step back so she can come inside, then wrap her in a hug. “What are you doing here?”
She pats the bag hanging at her hip. “I came to support you in your time of need.”
In retrospect, implying that Hartley was the one who ended our relationship may not have been the best idea when Ella called last night, but it was easier than explaining why I was distraught over a decision I’d voluntarily made. How was I supposed to know she’d drive two hours to support me in my “time of need”?
“Do you want some coffee?” I ask on the way to the kitchen.
She drops her bag on the couch and follows me. “You realize it’s almost three in the afternoon, right?”
“I just woke up and I need caffeine.” I retrieve a mug from the cabinet and drop a pod in the Keurig.
“I know it’s tempting to sleep all day but messing with your circadian rhythm won’t help your mental health.”
I let out a sardonic laugh. “More like the opposite. I was awake until ten-thirty this morning.”
“Ouch. What about melatonin? Have you tried that?”
“No.” Mostly because I deserve sleepless nights after the way I treated Hartley.
“Okay. We’re going to the store this afternoon to get some. And fair warning—this is the only cup I’m letting you have today,” she says as I toss the spent coffee pod in the trash.
I don’t have the energy to argue, so I just nod and take my mug to the couch.
Ella slides her bag to the coffee table and sits beside me. “What would you rather do, watch an action movie, go for a walk, or play darts with Hartley’s picture on the dartboard? Oh! Or this.” She reaches into a side pocket and holds up a booklet that says, “53 Ways to Fold a Paper Airplane.”
My lips form a faint smile. “I didn’t know there were fifty-three ways to fold a paper airplane.”
“Me neither.”
“Also, you really packed a dartboard?”
She opens the main compartment of her bag and removes a travel-sized bullseye (complete with the aforementioned picture of Hartley) and two sets of magnetic darts. “I know the real kind would’ve been more enjoyable, but I didn’t want to risk damaging your apartment.”
“You’re so weird,” I say over the rim of my mug, “but I appreciate your efforts to cheer me up.” I swallow a heaping dose of guilt along with my coffee because Ella should be at Hartley’s apartment with my face on that dartboard.
“You just sounded so sad last night, and I didn’t want you to be by yourself all weekend.”
My roommate surprised his girlfriend with tickets to some country concert in Knoxville for their six-month anniversary. It’s nice to have the apartment to myself for a few days. There’s only so much saccharine a guy can tolerate when he’s had a breakup-induced stomachache for the past three weeks. I appreciate Ella’s effort, though.
“So, which one do you want to do?”
I weigh my options as I stare into my coffee. I’ve already watched every action movie on my streaming subscription thanks to insomnia, and the dartboard is out for obvious reasons. Origami and physical activity don’t sound enticing either.
“Truthfully? I just want to see Hartley one last time,” I confess. “I know it’s crazy, but...” I need to make sure she’s okay, or at the very least, functioning better than I am. Maybe then I’ll be able to get more than a couple hours of fitful sleep. Except I can’t say any of that to Ella, so instead I settle on, “I miss her.”
“Court, you loved this girl. You thought you had a future with her. There’s nothing wrong with wanting closure after what she did to you.”
My sister’s well-intended words spear me in the chest. I am such an asshole. But before I can tell her we’re staying here and making paper airplanes—which is the most random breakup pick-me-up ever, I might add—she stands and removes the mug from my hands.
“Do you have any idea of where we can find her?”
“The art gallery. Her showcase is tonight.”
“What time does it start?”
“Six, I think, but I don’t want her to see me.”
“We’ll go at six-thirty and watch the crowd. When there’s enough people in the gallery, we can go in and see her without her knowing.”
Maybe it’s the sleep deprivation, but I actually consider Ella’s plan and whether we can pull it off. The crowd should provide enough cover, right? But if it doesn’t work, I risk traumatizing Hartley all over again on the one night she’s worked all year for. “I don’t know, El. It seems pretty risky to me.”
“Is it a private event?”
“No.”
“Okay, then.” She pulls me off the couch and pushes me toward my bedroom. “You’re taking a shower, we’re going out for some melatonin and something nice for me to wear, and we’re going to the gallery.”
“I think it’s safe,” Ella says .
The knots in my stomach pull tighter. This is a terrible, terrible idea. “Maybe we should ? —”
“Get out of the car? I agree.” She exits the driver’s side and starts toward the gallery with the same level of confidence that undoubtedly landed her the role in Bargain Assassin .
“Dammit,” I mutter, catching up to her lead.
She grabs ahold of my arm and we shuffle in behind a small group of attendees. “Do you know where she’s set up?” she whispers.
I shake my head, a familiar vibration coursing through my veins as I scan the crowded room. Even though I don’t see Hartley yet, I swear I can feel her. I pull in a slow breath and then my feet are moving of their own accord, weaving us around clusters of bodies and other capstone displays until we reach the back corner of the gallery.
I hear her first—a quiet laugh that ignites a fresh ache in my heart—before a patron steps aside, giving me a clear view of the woman I forced out of my life. My lungs seize in a weird paradox of not being able to breathe while simultaneously feeling like I can breathe for the first time since our breakup.
“I hate that she looks so beautiful,” Ella whispers.
And she is.
So. Damn. Beautiful.
Her floor-length dress is what she calls “van Gogh blue,” and her wavy brown hair has been clipped to one side to cascade over her shoulder. She looks like a Hollywood starlet rather than a woman whose boyfriend ripped out her heart three weeks ago.
Her only outward sign of nerves is the way her fingers twist together, but I don’t think anyone will notice that. They’ll only see exactly what Ella sees—a gorgeous, phenomenally talented artist on the brink of an incredible career. I want to pull her into my arms and tell her how proud of her I am, but it’s not worth the damage to my balls and/or windpipe.
I’m about to tell Ella we need to leave when Hartley’s gaze collides with mine. Her luminous smile vanishes, and her face becomes a kaleidoscope of emotions: shock, confusion, hurt...and then rage.
“Oh hell no,” Ella says quietly. “This is a public event. She does not get to break up with you and then get mad when you show up here.”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to defend Hartley, but I can’t do that without coming clean about the lies I told my sister yesterday...and the lies I told Hartley when I ended things. I go for a partial truth instead. “I don’t think she recognizes you and assumes I’ve brought a date. ”
Ella’s eyes sparkle with mischief. “Now that’s something we can work with.”
“Meaning . . . ?”
She tosses her head back with a slightly too-loud giggle. Several heads around us turn in our direction, but Ella ignores the attention.
“What are you doing?” I whisper-shout.
“Exacting some revenge.” Her hands fiddle with my tie while she beams up at me. “No one treats my big brother like crap and gets away with it.”
My stomach lurches as I glance back at Hartley, whose glare reads, Fuck off all the way to Satan’s tea party in the seventh circle of hell. I’m debating whether to set the record straight when she cocks a fist and sends it through the blank canvas beside her. The gallery falls into stunned silence, but she just smiles like it was all planned.
“Thank you for attending tonight’s performance of The Evolution of a Lie . Good night.” Without missing a beat, she gives her audience a quick bow and beelines toward the back exit.
“Wow, dramatic much?” Ella mutters.
Or at least I think that’s what she says. It’s hard to hear over the echo of Hartley’s announcement reverberating through my head. Abandoning my sister, I maneuver around the crowd to read the sign introducing her capstone.
“Central Tennessee State College presents, The Evolution of a Lie, by Hartley Billings.”
The first canvas is titled Pancakes a la Gordon.
Then, Falling Stars.
Then, Rubber Ducks.
Wait . . . is this . . . ? No fucking way.
Knots of dread settle heavy in my stomach as I register what I’m looking at—Hartley’s capstone is a journal of our relationship, one piece of art for each month we were together. I skip the rest of the canvases and walk straight to the blank one at the end.
A Coward’s Escape.
“Whoa,” Gianna says.
“Yep.”
“Have you told her any of this?”
I shake my head. “I wanted her to look at Italy as a place to escape to after her heart was broken, not the reason I broke her heart in the first place. The less she knew the truth and the more she believed I cheated, the better. ”
“But why not tell her now?”
I can’t fault Gianna’s hopeful smile. Once upon a time, I believed in pipe dreams too.
“It wouldn’t do any good. That was six years ago, and I guarantee she’ll still think I’m lying.”
“That’s—”
“And because talking about it upsets her and I’ve done enough of that already.”
“Yes, but?—”
“And because the race ends in twelve days, so...” I let my resigned shrug say the rest: Hartley will go back to her life, I’ll go back to mine, and we’ll never see each other again.
I knew this was coming. Hell, at the starting line, I was already planning my own personal party to celebrate not having to be around her anymore. But that was before I remembered how well she fits against me. Before she blasted me with light I haven’t felt since the day I walked away from her.
Fuck.
How am I supposed to just go home after this?
“I got it,” Big Mike announces, showcasing his McDonald’s bag like it’s a prized possession. When no one acknowledges his presence, he continues with, “It wasn’t that hard to get there, either. You just gotta go outside and take the shuttle to terminal one.”
Boyd shoots a sardonic look at the Wise Guys. “I still can’t believe that we’ve had access to authentic cuisine for nine days and you go out of your way to get the most Americanized food you can find.”
“This is the samurai mac burger ,” Mike says, pulling a wrapped object from the bag. “You can’t get this in America, just like you can’t get a McFiesta or a Hongos Deluxe or a Serious Angus.”
“That’s not what—never mind.” Boyd waves a dismissive hand. “Enjoy your whatever the hell that is.”
“Oh, I will. This thing smells amazing.”
“It smells like a cheeseburger,” Hartley mutters to me. Although we haven’t agreed on much during the race, we’re united in our dislike for Big Mike. We all are, for that matter.
“Do you guys mind if we cop a squat in the corner?” Mike asks.
First of all, who the hell says “cop a squat”? And second, yes, we do mind .
“Uh, I’m not sure there’s a whole lot of extra room,” I say as diplomatically as possible. One of the best parts about our layover at Haneda Airport in Tokyo is that it’s literally the cleanest airport in the world. After we ate (sushi and ramen, for the record), a bunch of us sprawled out on the floor because being horizontal is a luxury when you’re traveling.
And now Big Mike and his big dumb cheeseburger are ruining it.
“What are you talking about? There’s plenty of room.” He kicks my backpack to the side to clear a space for DeAngelo. “Also, we should bet on what we’re gonna see in China.”
“With what money?” Boyd asks.
“Don’t you have leftover leg money?”
“Considering they only give us a little bit and taxis and food aren’t free, not really.”
“You should budget better. Me and D have a hundred and four dollars in our spare pot.” He holds his fist out for DeAngelo to bump.
“I don’t even want to know how you’ve managed that.”
My guess is cheating, but I keep that to myself.
“Anyway, I bet twenty bucks that we’re gonna see that giant wall,” he says, waving his palm through the air to apparently demonstrate the Great Wall of China. “Oh! Or a dragon. A couple of them, probably. Don’t Chinese people love dragons?”
Hartley catches my eye with a look that says, Does it hurt to be this idiotic?
My discreet smile says, Apparently not .
Arriving at a new destination usually goes something like this: The pilot rolls up to the gate, we get off the plane, and we get outside to the taxi queue as fast as possible. If anyone asks about the cameras along the way, we give the standard, “We’re filming a travel documentary.”
This is not what happens when we land in Kunming, China, because this time, Big Mike has the great idea of saying, “We’re famous musicians from America,” when a teenage tourist notices the cameras following us.
Chaos ensues.
We’re talking pictures and autographs and requests to sing our nonexistent songs from at least two hundred travelers. That leaves us with choosing between wasting valuable time to perpetuate a lie or looking like asshole Americans and blowing everyone off while we literally run away from them .
Thankfully, Hartley comes through with a third option.
“Follow my lead.” She clamps a hand over her mouth and holds her stomach, then takes off. I’m two steps behind her when it clicks that she’s doing the universal signal for I’m about to puke , also known as the perfect antidote for crowds. Suddenly, the people closest to us are shuffling back in horror, creating a clear path out of the concourse. She drops her hands as soon as we escape the crowd, but we continue our sprint through the airport.
When we reach the ground transportation area outside, she pulls the clue from her fanny pack and shows it to the first taxi driver we see. “Do you know where this is?”
He studies the close-up picture of colorful writing for five long seconds, then nods. “The stone staircase at Yuantong Temple.”
“Can you take us there?”
He nods again and pops the trunk.
We waste no time offloading our packs and sliding into our assigned positions. We’ve done this so many times now that Hartley knows to lean forward a little while I turn my upper body slightly to the right to maximize the available space and avoid her sitting in my lap.
Along the way, our driver tells us Yuantong is a Buddhist temple that’s about twelve hundred years old.
“Interesting,” I say.
“What is?” Hartley asks.
“It was built around the time the Vikings discovered Iceland. It’s just cool to see how history overlaps.”
Her lips quirk up in an amused smile. “Are you trying out for Jeopardy after the race is over?”
“More like grading projects for a friend’s history class a couple of months ago. It was pretty awesome because the kids had to make a longboat out of a paper towel roll and turn in diary entries as if they were on the boat the day they landed in Iceland.”
She quietly studies me, then says, “The teaching thing suits you. Maybe it’s time you considered making it permanent.”
“I’m only helping out because the district is short staffed.”
“You just don’t want to admit I was right that night I kidnapped you from the library.”
Ah, yes. Behavioral Neuroscience and Dr. Crespo, the asshole professor who taught it. From day one of my junior year, he made it clear that I was in his crosshairs. It’s not my fault his daughter couldn’t take “No thank you, I’m not interested” for an answer when we were sophomores, or that he couldn’t separate her personal life from his academic career. I swear that guy had an entirely separate grading scale for my assignments.
By the time first semester finals rolled around, my GPA was dangerously close to dropping below the minimum for my scholarship. On my fourth straight night of holing up in the library to study, Hartley dragged me out under the threat of burning my backpack, then confiscated my vending machine snacks and cooked a real meal for me. While we ate, we played a game of backup plan, where we came up with alternate careers if I needed to switch majors to save my scholarship. After I tossed out a bunch of nonsense jobs, Hartley said it was time to suck it up and face the fact that I’d make an excellent teacher.
“I guess teaching is better than being a rectal thermometer tester...although some days it feels the same.”
Her head falls back with laughter I haven’t heard in years. It hits me like a full blast from the sun, but it’s the sight of her exposed throat that sets my skin on fire. Rather than look away, I relish the burn and allow my eyes to linger on that little space just below her ear that always made her moan when I kissed it.
Would she still make the same sound now?
Is someone else the cause of that sound now?
The intruding thought reminds me once again that I know nothing about Hartley’s life today. We still haven’t talked much aside from our short conversation in the jump pod and she certainly hasn’t shared any details with the other competitors.
Steering the discussion into safer territory, I say, “Thanks for taking the lead at the airport. That was a great idea.”
Her jaw hinges open as she blinks back at me. “I’m sorry, did you just admit my amazing decision-making skills are the sole reason we’re in first place?”
I swallow a laugh. “Not in so many words, but sure.”
“Well in that case, you’re welcome.”