He appeared in the doorway to the kitchen then, looking heartbreakingly handsome. He blinked sleep-heavy eyes, rubbing a hand over his head, but his gaze cleared as he glanced between Lawren and me. My face felt like a piece of paper, brittle and drained.
Panic infused the air, reaching me before I even said a word, and I knew it was worse than I imagined. The other shoe, the one I’d been waiting to dodge these past six weeks, toppled downward toward my napper, and I pushed past Cole, out of the kitchen. The last thing I needed was his family watching me come apart for a second time.
“What did you say to her?”
“I’m sorry. I thought she knew.” The guilt in Lawren’s muted response stung my eyes with tears.
The bedroom blurred as the tears came faster. I wanted to get dressed and get out of there, but Cole’s footsteps stopped me from changing clothes. If we had to do this now, I didn’t want to be half-dressed and end up running out to the car naked.
He shut the door behind him, his face lined and exhausted, eyes watching me as though I was a caged animal suddenly let loose on a zoo of frightened people. I didn’t know what to say; the hurt in my heart that he had kept something this big from me made me feel ripped in half, but the idea of why he looked scared right now terrified me.
“I’m sorry I let him think I knew.”
“You’re apologizing to me?”
“Only for that.” I grabbed my overnight bag from the overstuffed chair in the corner of the room and started dumping makeup and clothes into it.
“Where are you going?”
“I have class.”
“Why are you taking your things?”
I stopped moving, letting the pain wash over me. Accepting the truth of what I’d known all along—Cole and our relationship was too good to be true. The sickness in his eyes at the sight of my tears only made me more determined. “I think if there’s something that big in your past and you don’t want me to know about it, maybe we need to re-evaluate how things are going, that’s all. And it will be easier to do with some distance.”
“We’re going great, Ruby. You know that. This thing…it’s not that I don’t trust you enough to tell you. I’m afraid you’re not going to understand.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much the same thing as not trusting me.”
He sat down on the bed, looking like some kind of catalogue model in his pajama pants and bare chest, except for the broken, tortured expression pinching his features. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything. Sit.”
The words scraped out, as though they were coughed up with pieces of his guts and soul. I sat in the chair, my bag on my lap, and waited, one hundred percent sure I didn’t want to hear what he was about to say—that if the scene in the kitchen had knocked loose that suspended shoe, this was where it conked me on the head.
It was like opening the paper for a review the morning after opening night and knowing in your heart that the performance had been shitty. The knowledge of the inevitable would do nothing to dull the pain of seeing the words in black and white—unchangeable.
“I was a pretty awkward wean. My brothers gave me a hard time about being skinny and dorky, while they strutted around town in kilts with hot girls on their arms. Then suddenly, when I finally hit puberty around sixteen, everything changed. Girls liked me. Guys wanted to party with me. Gavin and the twins were gone to college and I kind of lost my tether without them.”
He took a shaky breath, blew it out, then continued without looking my direction. The ice water in my veins struggled to pump like blood—when it got into my heart, I would die.
“I spent the better part of a year sleeping around and pished half the time, barely getting through school, killing my parents. Then a girl from town, Poppy, came to me. She was obviously pregnant and claimed it was mine. I—” He broke off and rubbed a hand across his head, still avoiding my gaze. “I told her if the stories about her were true then she couldn’t know it was mine, and that trying to pin it on me wasn’t her golden ticket out of the slums. I was a real minger, Ruby. I felt terrible about it immediately, and spent a month cleaning up my act. I went to apologize, to tell her that if she said it was my baby that we’d work it out, that I wanted to support her.”
His gaze found mine then, desperate and pleading with me to understand. My entire body had gone numb when he’d confessed that this Poppy was poor, that he considered her beneath him—good enough to fuck, probably in the backseat of a car or the loo at the pub, but nothing more than a girl to toss aside when things got serious.
“But,” I prompted, needing to hear the rest of the story.
“But Poppy was dead. Her mother was a real devout Catholic. She’d called Poppy a whore and tossed her out, and she had tried to fix things by getting a back-alley, late-term abortion. She felt like she didn’t have another option, I guess, and I’ll never really forgive myself. Her death, it’s always going to rest at least partially on my shoulders. It took me a long, long time to believe that it’s not all my fault, though.”
“And the no sex thing?” I felt like a robot, and sounded like one, too. Like the totally calm voice couldn’t possibly belong to me while my insides melted down.
“The whole thing just changed my perspective on intimacy. It changed a lot of things.”
I stood up, my body shaking from the center all the way to the tips of my fingers. Cole had knocked up a poor girl then tossed her aside, and she’d gotten herself killed trying to fix it. Maybe he was telling the truth about feeling badly about it afterward, or that it had changed his outlook. I couldn’t deny the ratings on the site, or the truth about him taking sex more seriously than most of us.
But it didn’t change the fact that when he talked about Poppy, I saw my face. I might not be poor, but I was another girl his parents wouldn’t approve of, who would be seen as trying to legitimize herself by attaching myself to him, and it would end the same way.
His inclination was to believe his family’s reputation and wealth meant more than a girl’s life, or the life of a baby she’d claimed was his. Everything I’d begun to believe over the past month and a half crumbled into dust, into grains of sand that slipped through my fingers. I was wrong to trust him with more than my body. I was stupid to think his family didn’t matter.
It all mattered.
I sidled toward the door, keeping as much space between Cole and me as possible.
“Ruby, wait. Please.”
The pleading, raw edge to his voice almost undid me. It almost made me stop, made me reconsider the fact that I could be different. But the shadow of this girl I’d never met, but knew—because she was me—flickered in the edge of my vision. I would be her, one day, if I stayed.
Broken beyond repair. Laughed offstage without the courage to ever audition again, no matter the circumstances. I had to go now.
“I can’t stay, Cole. I don’t think you’re a bad guy, and you’re right—you can’t blame yourself for Poppy’s choices. But I’ll be her to you one day—a girl you regret getting involved with but feel responsible for seeing things through. If you could push her aside because of her circumstances, you can do the same to me.”
“No, Ruby. No. You’re wrong, you don’t—”
He stood up, reaching for me, but I backed away. “Your family is more important to you than anything, and that’s how it should be. This isn’t going to work. Somewhere deep inside, you already knew that.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Not for the first time, theatre saved my life. I threw myself into rehearsals for Annie Get Your Gun until Christmas vacation, and the results were good—if any of Geoff’s contacts came to see me again, they’d get the show of their lives.
I still struggled to get through “They Say It’s Wonderful” without breaking down into tears, but we had some time. The fact that Evan, one of my regular co-stars, had gotten the role of Frank should have made it easier, but every time his lips touched mine, Cole’s face popped into my mind and I wanted to
take a shower.
Being home for Christmas was nice. Even though my dad was only in town for a couple of days, my mom and I had a nice time shopping and catching up. Emilie arrived the day before New Year’s Eve with a bottle of rum and we were flopped in my old bedroom, still decorated with theatre awards, cheerleading pictures, and a stupid pink bedspread my mother had forced on me in seventh grade and had never changed.
“How are you doing?” Em asked, applying a thick coat of mascara in front of the mirror.
We were getting ready to go out for New Year’s—I didn’t feel like it at all, but I couldn’t deprive Emilie and Quinn of the holiday in New Orleans, plus staying home would pretty much make me the most pathetic person alive.
I shrugged. “Another day, another guy.”
“Ruby. I’m your best friend. We both know Cole wasn’t just another guy to you.”
“What do you want me to say? That he broke my heart?”
“Did he?”
“I broke my heart. I was the one who put myself in that situation again, so he’s not to blame.” I fluffed my hair and wandered into the bedroom to pull on a slinky gold Dior dress my mother had given me for Christmas.
She followed me a minute later, choosing a plum Versace with a full skirt and slipping it over her head. Quinn was going to be here any minute and we’d need to leave to make our dinner reservations, then we planned to head to an absinthe bar in the Quarter.
“I know I’ve pointed this out before, but Cole didn’t exactly do anything. You dumped him, and it was kind of preemptive.”
“He sent some poor, pregnant girl packing because she wasn’t good enough for him to bring home to mom and dad. You know he and I would have had the same ending, especially after my spectacular first meeting with his parents.” My throat throbbed. It had been two weeks, but I still struggled not to cry when I thought about Cole.
Emilie put a hand on my arm. “You don’t know that, Rubes. I saw you two together. It was something special, and from everything you told me, things were going great. Why would he get so involved with you—why would he sleep with you, after turning down everyone else—if he didn’t plan on seeing it through?”
The logic made sense, but relationships weren’t built on logic and I’d been burned by too many of them. Luckily, her phone buzzed before I could break down into sobs or scream at her for trying to convince me to get hurt worse later on.
“Quinn’s downstairs.”
We headed down the stairs and out the front door, where Quinn waited inside a limo, looking as striking as ever. Emilie melted into him and I averted my eyes as they greeted one another after a three-day break. He’d gone home with her for Christmas, avoiding his dad and easing the ever-present tension in her house. She said it had gone pretty well. They were better than ever.
They allowed me to float through the evening, keeping up the conversation at dinner and then on the way to the bar. Once we were there, the thumping bass and shouted laughter made talking impossible. I went through the motions, dancing with Emilie, giving Quinn a hard time, smiling when the guitarist from the band winked at me from the stage, but my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t want to be out pretending to have fun.
The old familiar itch to solve my problems with sex tried to struggle loose, but disappeared before I could dig in my nails. For the first time, it didn’t seem like the answer.
The countdown to midnight began and the guitarist showed up at my elbow. He was handsome in a Southern-rocker kind of way, his long, dark hair a deliberate mess and a pair of boots peeking from underneath his tight jeans.
“Adam,” he shouted, sticking out a hand.
“Ruby.”
The bar exploded into Happy New Year’s a few seconds later, streamers popping and confetti flying like thin, colorful snowflakes. Adam’s arm went around my waist and he pulled me into him, planting a kiss on my lips.
My entire body stiffened. I forced myself to relax into the moment—this was New Year’s Eve and a hot boy wanted to kiss me at midnight—but when his tongue pushed into my mouth I pulled back and patted his chest. “Happy New Year.”
He nodded. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
I wound my way back to our table, ignoring Emilie and Quinn’s still-going midnight kiss, and picked up my phone. Tears pricked my eyes and my throat throbbed. A painful sob wrenched lose when I saw a text message from Cole:
I miss you so bad it hurts.
***
I didn’t hear from Cole again over break, even though I checked my phone far more often than I cared to admit. I went back to Whitman a couple of days after Emilie and Quinn returned. The play opened in a week and we had plenty of tweaking still to be done.
Geoff had called and made sure I was coming in to audition for the next community production he was staging—Our Town. It was better than West Side Story, but still kind of blah, though playing Emily Webb was kind of a rite of passage. Those rehearsals would gear up as soon as the performances of Annie wrapped, so at least I wouldn’t have time to focus on my lack of a dating life.
He’s also asked if I’d do another curriculum segment at the Coterie. I wanted to, badly, and being with Caroline and Noelle and the other kids right now would be a great distraction, but running into Cole didn’t appeal to me. I hadn’t been able to shake this breakup as easily as all the others. It had been a month, but if I saw him, I knew I would cry.
God help me if we had any classes together this semester.
Opening Night for Annie was the Friday before classes resumed. Most of the students had already returned and we had sold out the entire weekend. Geoff mentioned that two of his friends planned to check me out again, probably incognito this time, and thinking about it made my heart race. It would go well—I felt great in the role, and for all of Evan’s snobbery was, he had great instincts onstage.
Normal preshow jitters infected me in the dressing room, the ones born of adrenaline and nervous excitement. I was putting the finishing touches on my stage makeup and tugging on my cowboy boots when a knock on the door made me jump three feet.
A stagehand glowered on the other side, his arms full of purple thistles. He thrust them at me. “Could you get your boyfriend to pick some non-attack flowers next time?”
He turned and hurried off before I could correct him about the boyfriend comment, even though the flowers were clearly from Cole. Part of the expectation about tonight had been the surety that he would be in the audience—he’d pretty much seen every performance of mine since last summer. I wanted to know he was sitting out there, wanted him there watching, and the pathetic fact made me want to punch myself in the face.
We’d called things off. Theatre was my domain. I didn’t need him here to have a good performance, or to feel proud of what I knew would be a great show.
But I still wanted him there. And that made me angry.
I plucked the note out of the flowers, tossing them on the dressing table and ignoring the scrape of the thorns across my forearms. My brain tried to force my fingers to rip the little card in two without reading it, but they wouldn’t comply, listening to my heart, instead. And my heart wanted a moment spent close to Cole.
You know you’ll be magic tonight, so I won’t bother telling you to break a leg. I wish I could be there to see your brilliance.
He wasn’t coming.
My heart sank into my belly, even though I had known it. He had shared his deepest secret with me, a source of obvious pain and shame—I’d read that on him one of the first times we’d met, when he’d insisted he wasn’t a hero, that he wasn’t perfect—and I had walked away. He might miss me as much as I missed him, but it didn’t mean I hadn’t done the right thing.
Cole deserved a girl his family would adore, a girl he could marry and stand beside with pride as her belly grew with the next generation of Stuarts, and a girl who would love the bits of him that weren’t so shiny.
After all of these days apart, all of the endless hours I’d had to th
ink, one thing had become clear to me: I was the girl that loved Cole in spite of the mistakes of his past. I loved all of him, and I’d never wanted to be with anyone so badly in all of my life. The idea of walking through the next year and a half at Whitman without him made me ill, and the idea of moving to New York and falling in love with someone else made me want to puke.
I loved him enough to let him go, because although I might love him, I would never be the girl his family would adore, or the girl he could marry without a second thought.
***
The show went off without a hitch, and when Liam slunk out of the throng of congratulators in the lobby afterward, I managed a smile.
He smiled back, an apologetic one. “You were smashing, as always. And you look hot in that costume.”
I rolled my eyes, ignoring the churning in my stomach. “Thank you.”
“I’m sorry about the way I acted. You’re an awesome girl and you know it.”
“I’m not the grudge-holding type. How was Africa?”
He spent the next fifteen minutes telling me about his first film experience, and I finally shook him and went backstage to change.
Evan, Whitman University’s Frank Butler and my co-star, poked his head in the girl’s dressing room and grinned. “Great show.”
“You, too.”
“Listen, I’m starving, and remembered you always are after performances, too. Want to get a bite?” He raised his eyebrows, a suggestion other than dinner darkening his soft brown gaze.
We’d done it before—gone home together after a performance. Maybe letting Cole go for real was as simple as sleeping with someone else. Perhaps that was the way to force my brain to move on. Evan was as good as anyone; I was in no danger of falling for him and it could be a one-time thing without either of us making a big deal out of it.
Heat Up the Fall: New Adult Boxed Set (6 Book Bundle) Page 83