26. Chapter Twenty-Six
Aspen
In my twenty-one years, the thought of kissing Stanley Ermington had never once crossed my mind.
Not once. Not as a wonder, not as a dare, not as the thing you idly try on in your head about a person you’ve known your whole life. The thought had simply never been in the building.
And it isn’t in the building now, either. His face comes near mine, and my mind goes white. He says something low, and I have a moment to brace for a peck, a beat, a photo, the thing the whole room is screaming for, and then his mouth is on mine, and the half-second is gone, and so is the room.
The chant breaks into a hooting mess. Ow ow! Yeah! Woo! Yee!
Gianna’s phone, the heat off all those bodies, the music — all of it drops back like somebody hauled it into another room and shut the door.
I am a person who narrates her own life from about six inches above her own head.
I can stand in any room and give you the count, the angle, the exit.
And for the length of this, there is no narration, no count, no six inches of daylight between me and my own life.
There is him, and there is nothing else.
My hand comes up off my side and lands flat on his chest. Not to push.
I pull him down for better access to his mouth before any part of me makes that decision.
This was supposed to be a peck. He doesn’t make it one. There’s a moment where either of us could have pulled back, and neither of us does.
We come apart, and the world crashes back in at once, too loud, too bright.
The cheer is still going when I look up at him, and his mask is gone. Just — gone. Like he set it down somewhere and forgot to pick it back up.
He leans in, mouth at my ear. “You’re not supposed to be blushing.” Low, just for me. “To them, we’ve done this a hundred times.”
I breathe in. Right. Right.
My eyes flick across the room, and the fact of being watched comes back like cold water.
I smile at Gianna, who is shrieking about how cute we are, holding her phone to her chest like she caught something rare, and the party swallows the whole thing down a moment later and moves along — because to all of them this was a couple kissing for a photo.
Gianna got her shot. The room got the thing it was chanting for, and the room has already forgotten it.
I’m the only one left standing here with the floor gone out from under me.
I look at Stanley, and he’s watching me.
“You okay?” he asks.
I nod.
And then I catch the rest of the room.
Lucy isn’t cheering. Lucy is watching us thoughtfully. Benson is beside her with his arms folded, and he’s pretending he wasn’t just staring. Blue is grinning at Stanley. Through the kitchen door, Rowan and Percy wear quiet smiles. That’s when I realize ––
They know.
Every one of them. The boys. Lucy. They know this is fake. Which means everyone I thought we were performing for are people who know exactly what we are, standing in a circle, watching to see what we’d do when they pushed.
And Stanley kissed me anyway.
He turns to walk away, but I grab his arm and pull him back to me.
My nails dig into his arm. Four seconds ago, I forgot the room existed.
Now I know exactly what it looked like from where they stood, and that makes me the punchline, kissed on peer pressure in a house full of people who are in on the joke.
I realize that I’ve reached for him, and I immediately let go of him like he’s a hot pan.
He starts to say something. I don’t hear it.
I’m already turning, already cutting a line through the bodies toward the front door, because if I stay in this room one more second, I am going to do something with my face that I will not be able to take back in front of every person who matters to him.
The cold hits me on the porch. I take the steps too fast, and I’m halfway down the front walk, my heels loud on the concrete, before the door bangs open behind me.
“Linwood.”
I don’t stop.
“Aspen — hey —”
I keep walking. The street’s empty and dark, the party shrunk to a thud of bass behind us, and I am furious in a way that has nowhere to go, so I do the thing you do with fury that has nowhere to go. I turn around and I aim it at him.
“Don’t chase me to my house, Ermington! I’m not one of your fucking jokes!”
He pulls up short on the walk, a few feet off, breathing hard, no coat. “What are you—”
“You kissed me in front of them.” My voice is shaking, and I hate that it’s shaking.
“They know, don’t they? All of them. Your roommates, Lucy — I read it the second we stopped kissing.
And you kissed me anyway. For a photo. In front of the exact people who you already told this was all made up!
” My throat closes, and I shove the rest of it out through the gap.
“I have spent my whole life being the thing people are kind to because of who I’m standing next to.
The coach’s daughter. The analyst. And you just stood me up in the middle of your own house and made me the punchline in front of your own friends, so — no.
I don’t do well being somebody’s joke. And you don’t get to fix your face into something sorry and walk it back. ”
I’m out of air. The cold’s gone all the way into my throat.
And Stanley just stands there in the dark and takes it. The whole thing. His jaw is tight. He isn’t reaching for the grin. There is no grin anywhere near him.
When he finally speaks, it’s quiet, and there is nothing like a joke in it.
“You think I kissed you for show.”
“I know you did,” I bite back.
“In front of the four guys who know it’s fake.” He takes a step toward me, and there’s heat coming off him now, not the warm kind. “The exact people there would be zero point performing for. You’re the smartest person I have ever met, Linwood. So run it again. Who was I selling it to?”
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out.
“Nobody,” he says, before I can. “There was nobody to sell it to. Everybody in that room worth fooling already knows.”
“Then why—”
“Because I wanted to.”
He says it plainly. No cushion under it, no joke about it, like a man setting something heavy down on the pavement between us and stepping back so I can see the whole of it.
“You think I kissed you for show? I kissed you because I wanted to, Linwood. I wanted to since Thanksgiving.”
My breath sucks in. He –– what?
The street goes very quiet.
Every argument I built between the kitchen and the curb is gone.
Swept off the table. He took the one thing I know how to do — the read, the analysis, the safe high ground six inches above my own life — and he turned it around and pointed it straight back at me.
He’s right. If they already know this isn’t real, then there was no one to perform for.
But it doesn’t make it any less embarrassing.
“Stanley.” His name comes out of me like a warning as he steps closer. Close enough that I can see his breath fog in the cold between us.
“There’s nobody out here,” he says, lower, all the heat in it banked down into something steadier and worse. “No phone. No chant. No Gianna. Nobody to put on a single thing for, three doors down from your own front door, in the dark, where not one person who knows us will ever see it.”
His large hand grabs the side of my face. His fingers extend to my neck, where my hair is resting. He leans down, searching my face for permission. My heart is like a jackhammer. I don’t know how to react, so I don’t. I let it happen.
Then his lips touch mine, and the shame in my chest explodes into pieces.
There is no performance to blame this time. No excuse stacked and waiting.
There are only his hands framing my face like I’m something he’s allowed to hold now, and the cold, and the dark, and the fact that he’s kissing me again without an audience.
There’s no explanation for this. No shelf I can put it on, no label, nowhere to set it down because a kiss with no witnesses can only be one thing.
The scary thing is I’m already kissing him back. Both of my hands are holding on his arms, hauling him in instead of holding him off. For the second time tonight, the entire world drops away, and there is only him.
Then the reality of what we’re doing has real teeth. He isn’t mine. This was all built on a lie. And now we’re just confused.
I step back, and my hands are still shaking, but it’s not anger anymore.
It’s fear.
Because the anger had somewhere to live — anger I could aim, anger I could walk off — and this has nowhere to go at all.
Because I just lost the last argument I had left, the deniability’s in pieces on the sidewalk, and there is not one single thing left in the entire world for me to hide behind, and the man standing in front of me in the cold with his mask gone knows every bit of it.
“I can’t,” I whisper.
He doesn’t move. “Can’t what.”
And that’s the whole problem, standing right there in three words, because I don’t have an answer for him.
I can’t say can’t want you, because that ship has visibly, humiliatingly sailed.
I can’t say can’t do this, because I just did, twice, and the second time I did it with no pressure at all.
And I can’t say the real one because the real one is I can’t survive being wrong about you, and I am not going to stand on a dark street and explain to Stanley Ermington that the last time I let a hockey player all the way in, I spent a week alone in my bedroom with a question I couldn’t ask out loud, learning in real time exactly how disposable I was to a man who’d promised me I wasn’t.
I am not going to tell him that the thing I’m actually afraid of isn’t wanting him.
It’s wanting him and being right back in that bedroom a year from now, learning the same lesson a second time, except this one I wouldn’t survive, because this one I’d have chosen with my eyes open.
So I just look at him one more second, standing there in the cold with no coat and no mask and the truth still hanging in the air between us where neither of us can pretend it isn’t, and then I turn and walk the three doors home with my heart going like a snare drum and absolutely nowhere left to put a single piece of any of it.
I don’t look back.
I can feel him still standing there the whole way home.