47. Chapter Forty-Seven #2
“Why would I be mad?” He looks at me, then looks back up at the ceiling, and his voice goes even and careful. “Season’s starting. I’ll have games every weekend, travel, the whole thing. I was going to tell you tonight.” He pauses. “That I can’t keep coming.”
“Oh,” I say.
I make myself think about how happy that girl, Melly Sorcha, will be when I call her. I hold onto that, because it’s easier than holding onto the way my chest is quietly folding in on itself.
“Okay then,” I say. “I’ll call her.”
He breathes in. “It’d make me feel better. Knowing you weren’t alone in here.”
“I’m not doing it for you,” I tell him.
He grins up at the dark. “I know you’re not, Penelope.”
I lie there and listen to his breathing even out, and I let the truth settle over me. I knew this was coming. I just didn’t think it would arrive this fast.
“So,” I say, keeping it light, “I guess I’ll see you at Hawthorne, then.”
He goes still beneath me.
“There’s a party this weekend,” I add.
“Right.”
“Maybe my new roommate will want to come.” I nod against his chest. “The girls will love her. I’ll call her tomorrow.”
I don’t call her the next day.
I tell myself it’s the work, and there is a mountain of it, everything I’ve let slide while I’ve traded sleep for stolen midnight hours. But the truth is I need one more day to hold the room empty, even knowing it’s finished. One more day.
When I finally call Melly, she’s so thrilled she moves in that same afternoon, boxes and all. Mara’s here when she arrives, mid-download on the weekend’s gossip about Lucy and Benson. That they might make their debut as an actual public couple at the Hawthorne party tonight.
Mara, being Mara, invites Melly along before she’s even set the last box down.
“Oh — I don’t know,” Melly says, and she glances at me like turning it down might wound me.
I give her a small, easy smile to let her know it wouldn’t.
Mara keeps working on her anyway, and Melly says something about her boyfriend coming over, and Mara — no filter, none — asks straight out if he’s hot.
I go quiet, because I didn’t know Melly had a boyfriend.
Not that it matters, it’s just that I’d been picturing a night of only girls, no boys dragged into the daylight of it.
There’s a pause before Melly answers Mara, a small careful pause, and something about the pause of it makes me hope, quietly, that he’s a good one.
That her hesitation doesn’t mean what pauses like that usually mean.
That night, Mara and I get ready at Gianna and Lucy’s.
Mara warns me on the drive over that the two of them are still tense with each other, but she’s being dramatic, because the second I step through the door, Gianna’s got 90s music shaking the walls and Lucy’s right beside her at the mirror, the two of them passing a mascara wand back and forth like nothing was ever wrong.
And because Mara can see the tension’s gone, she takes it as license to talk, at length, about how unfairly hot Benson Reeve is.
“Would you stop.” Gianna scoffs into the mirror. “He’s my brother. And now he’s her boyfriend.”
“Oh — so it’s official?” Mara swings around to look at Lucy, then at me, like I’m somehow part of this situation.
Lucy goes pink. Gianna rolls her eyes.
“Yes,” Gianna says. “It’s official. Will you stop.”
The warning bounces right off her. Mara just moves down the roster instead, cataloging every good-looking boy at Hawthorne, then on the hockey team, and when she lands on Drew Faulkner and Theo Marsh, I laugh before I can help it.
“What’s funny?” Mara’s eyes cut sideways, gleaming — a woman who’s just scented blood in the water.
“It’s nothing.”
“No.” She sets her drink down. “Do you have a crush?”
“God, no.” I shake my head.
“Penelope would literally never,” Gianna says.
I tip my head to one side. “I actually did. For a minute.”
All three of them stop what they’re doing and turn to look at me.
“Theo,” I admit. “Briefly. And it was only ever sex.”
Mara’s mouth drops open. “Just sex? I didn’t know you had that in you.”
“You’re joking.” Gianna stares. “Theo? Marsh?”
“I know, I know.” I’m laughing now. “My old roommate was hooking up with Drew, so it was forced proximity, I guess.”
“You guess.”
“I’m not into hockey players.” The second it’s out of my mouth, my stomach turns right over, because — what the hell am I saying? I’m in love with a hockey player. I’m so stupidly in love with one of those.
“Yeah,” Mara says, oblivious, “I can’t picture you and Theo. Not in a million years.”
“He’s a dog.” Gianna turns back to the mirror.
“He is,” I agree.
“I’ll take Drew, then,” Mara decides. “He’s the better-looking one anyway.”
“You can have Theo, too,” I say.
Gianna laughs and shakes her head.
I catch Lucy watching me from across the room. When our eyes meet, she blinks and looks away, quick, like she’s been caught at something.
“I can see you with a business major,” Mara says, studying me. “Someone in a suit.”
Percy would look unreal in a suit. The thought arrives fully formed, and I let it sail straight back out before it can show on my face.
I don’t answer her. I just settle back into the couch and watch the three of them finish getting ready, and I keep my one enormous secret exactly where it lives, tucked deep in my heart where no one can see it.
I’m in a black silk top and white jeans with my favorite coat over the top. I fold myself into the back of Gianna’s car for the three-minute drive to Hawthorne Street.
The whole way there I work at hiding my nerves.
I smile on cue, I answer when I’m spoken to, but like Lucy, I keep mostly to myself and let Mara and Gianna fill the car with noise.
It’s ridiculous, my nerves, because I know that house better than any of them.
I know it like the back of my own hand. I spent an entire summer inside it, but the knowing doesn’t settle me.
It does the opposite. It winds me tighter.
I get to stand in his house, surrounded by everyone we know, and pretend I don’t know the boy I’m in love with.
I pull my coat tighter over the silk. It’s cold out.
Gianna’s still going, happy, about how her brother’s captain of the team this year, how good it is to finally see him with Lucy — and my stomach sinks because Benson gets to walk in tonight with Lucy on his arm as his in front of everyone, and I have to walk in three feet behind them and pretend.
So why are the rules even a thing? Why did they build them? Why is he listening to them? Who are they protecting, and from what?
Gianna parks. I look up through the window at the house.
The party’s barely begun, and I can already hear the music the second Mara opens her door. My heart flutters because I’m about to walk in there and perform a whole evening of not knowing him.
Hawthorne is golden and roaring when we walk in.
Something happens to my knees, going through that front door.
I’ve been inside this house a hundred times and I’ve never once seen it alive like this — every light blazing, music coming up through the soles of my shoes, forty-odd people I half-recognize packed shoulder to shoulder with red cups in their hands.
This is what he does every weekend, for years, while I sat across town telling myself I didn’t mind.
The house even smells the way it always has — like boys and sweat and something familiar.
I walk in like I’ve never set foot here before. I’ve always been good at composure; tonight I wear it like the coat I’m sliding off my shoulders and hanging beside Gianna’s.