Chapter 2 #3
“It isn’t like that,” I said.
“Yes. It is.”
“Why?” she demanded. “Because you’re observant? Because you think you can look at people and diagnose them like market trends?”
“Because I was there.”
Let her hear it.
“I watched the room,” I said. “I watched you laugh. I watched everyone else enjoy it. And I watched exactly how hard you were working not to look like you minded.”
Heat climbed into her face. Anger and exposure.
I knew I should stop.
“And I watched my mother hand me another woman while standing behind your chair.”
Kelly went perfectly still.
“Why did that bother you?” she asked finally.
I could have lied. Could have made it about my mother and nothing else.
Instead I studied Kelly in the dark, with the house glowing behind us and the Atlantic in front of us and all the irritation and heat from dinner still crackling between us, and told her enough truth to get myself into deeper trouble.
“Because I didn’t like the way they were looking at you.”
She stared at me.
“That is not your problem to solve.”
“No,” I said. “But I solved it anyway.”
“By lying.”
“By choosing.”
“You don’t get to choose me without my consent.”
“You’re right.”
That stopped her.
“Say that again,” she said.
“You’re right. I should not have said it without asking you first.”
“You literally just admitted that and somehow made it sound like a strategy.”
“It’s not a strategy. It’s an apology.”
“Those sound very similar coming from you.”
The space between us felt too small. Or maybe not small enough.
“And because,” I went on, quieter now, “I didn’t want another woman sitting in a space I was already noticing you in.”
Silence. My own words settled around us, more revealing than I would’ve preferred.
Kelly inhaled, slowly.
When she spoke, her voice had changed. Not softer. More charged because of how careful it was.
“You are not allowed,” she said, “to say things like that to me after publicly detonating my evening.”
I almost smiled. “Noted.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
Her throat moved when she swallowed. My eyes tracked it before I stopped them.
She noticed.
Everything with Kelly sharpened. Even now, furious and humiliated and half a second from telling me away, there was something alive in her that reacted to heat with more heat and that interested me more than was convenient.
“You need to fix this,” she said.
“How?”
“That is not my problem.”
“It became your problem when you didn’t deny it.”
Her eyes flashed. “I didn’t deny it because denying it in front of your family would have been worse for me than playing along. You know that.”
“Yes.”
“Then stop acting like I had a choice.”
“You did have a choice. You chose dignity.”
“Don’t compliment me while I’m considering violence.”
The sane response. The one I should have expected. Instead of agreeing like a reasonable man, I heard myself ask, “Do I?”
Her eyes widened. “Excuse me?”
I stepped closer, so she had to tip her chin to hold eye contact.
“If I fix it tonight,” I said, “you become the woman I falsely claimed in front of my family.”
“You did falsely claim me.”
“And hand you the social debris?”
Her nostrils flared. She looked away first this time. “I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
Her head snapped back. “That is a wild amount of confidence.”
“I own a company. Confidence is in the job description.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
She laughed once, disbelieving. “You think because you noticed me feeling weird at dinner, you know anything.”
I let that sit there.
I shrugged and said, “You think because Britney doesn’t like me, I’m automatically your worst option.”
Her expression changed before she controlled it.
“Britney doesn’t like a lot of people,” she said too quickly.
“Britney likes most people.” I tilted my head. “Britney distrusts me.”
Kelly folded her arms tighter. “Maybe she has excellent judgment.”
“Maybe.”
“Mostly by you.”
The wind picked up again, cooler now, lifting the hem of her dress against her thighs. My attention went there and came back.
She drew in a breath that changed the line of her chest.
“I am not fake-dating you,” she said.
The words landed cleanly between us.
I didn’t react right away. Mostly because I was busy considering the shape of her logic. My family believed what I’d said and the room had already shifted around it.
Adrien’s graduation was next weekend. The whole family would be here. Her friends too. Kelly would rather die than let herself look rejected in this house now.
I knew it.
She saw the thought move through me and narrowed her eyes. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Think whatever manipulative thing you are thinking and how you are some chess master and me a pawn.”
“I wasn’t.” Then I shrugged. “Okay, possibly.”
She made a strangled sound. “I swear to God.”
I looked at her. Barefoot on my mother’s terrace. enough to shake. Too proud to retreat. And the most potent woman in my immediate vicinity.
“This,” I said slowly, “may be harder to undo than you think.”
Kelly stared at me.
Then she pointed toward the doors behind me. “Get inside before I throw you into the Atlantic.”
“I ‘d like to see you tr-”
“Leave, Xerses.”
I turned, but halfway to the doors, I stopped, and looked over my shoulder.
She was still standing at the railing, wind in her hair, fury in every line of her body, staring out at the ocean like it had personally betrayed her.
Beautiful. No one else was like her. I went back inside smiling.
Charlie caught one look at my face and muttered, “Oh, we are all doomed.”
He wasn’t wrong.