by Rachel Shane
I lifted a brow. “Well, no one’s stopping you from getting right back on a plane to Tampa.”
“Hey, don’t do that.” He reached over and tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. “No insults for one entire conversation. Let’s be real for once.”
I clamped my mouth shut and nodded. I hadn’t even realized we’d replaced our usual hate banter with…bonding.
“Next question?” he asked, eying me for approval to go ahead. “Why’d you quit?”
It was the question I’d been expecting but it still stabbed my gut hard enough to release a latent sob. A choice lay before me. Confess, stop bottling it inside. Tell him the things I couldn’t even bring myself to tell my therapist. Or deflect like I always did when someone asked me this question. I had prepared answers, of course. A family emergency. Sometimes I said a dying dog to garner sympathy. Other times a sick grandfather.
They were all lies. For some reason, I wanted Harrison to know the truth. I’d been carrying around this weight on my shoulders, a secret so heavy it dragged me down. My friends didn’t know, neither here nor back home. I’d only told Ms. L half truths about my mom pushing me to do pageants but nothing else. Only my mother knew, because she’d encouraged the whole thing with nods of her head and hours away from our shared hotel room. Somehow that felt worse than anything.
But Erin and Mackenzie would never understand. Harrison went to great lengths to get what he wanted. He’d claimed we were one and the same. He might get it.
“I didn’t like the person I had become.”
He blinked at me, waiting for more, and laced his fingers with mine. A patient interviewer knows the juicy story waits right behind the teller’s lips and with a little coaxing, he might be able to eke it out. “My therapist has been insisting I write all my feelings down in a letter to my mother, but maybe telling you will work instead.”
I shifted uncomfortably in the booth, working up the courage to say it all. Out loud. I’d meant to blurt it in a rush, rip it off like a bandaid. Instead it came out in fits and starts, tangents and misdirections. “I’ve never had a boyfriend,” I said, because that was both the start of the story and the end of it even if it was probably the wrong thing to say to a guy you’d hooked up with. “Never gone on a date or held hands under the moonlight.” As the words left my mouth, I realized both things had happened tonight…assuming holding hands in a pizza parlor counted as a date. Assuming I wanted it to. “Never even had oral sex.”
His brows lifted. He hadn’t expected me to say that and I hadn’t expected me to say it either. But Erin’s suggestions kept pulsing at the back of my mind. Plus, when I reached the end of this confession, he would realize why this fact was important to note.
“When I got here, I spent two years pining after a guy I could never have, who would never want me in that way, and I think deep down I always knew that. That’s probably why I chose him to crush on. He was safe. He’d never be with me and therefore I’d never have to face my past.”
“Nate, right? I saw the way you looked at him at your formal last year.”
“I don’t like him anymore,” I clarified. I like someone else now.
The doorbell jingled and a group of girls walked in, giggling. When they spotted Harrison, they glared at him. I clamped my mouth shut, dropping my face toward the table. Harrison squeezed my hand, waiting. Letting me know he was still here for me.
The girls chose a table on the opposite side of the restaurant, leaving me open to continue.
I sucked in a rattling breath. “There’s a thing about the pageant world that I always found so ironic. It’s meant to put beauty on a pedestal, but behind the scenes, it’s ugly as hell. People do horrible things to get ahead. None of it is within the rules, of course, and getting caught would mean getting eliminated from all future competitions. But there are ways around it, if you’re sneaky. If you have a mother who encourages it and helps keep your secret.”
I shifted again, trying to find the words to convey what I’d never said out loud. Harrison’s thumb traced small circles over my wrist, the same sort of circles he’d used to send me over the edge in the ocean. The only time I had been with someone because I wanted to be and for no other motive, I realized.
“I was sneaky,” I admitted, swallowing past the lump in my throat. “I’d start flirting with the judges months in advance. Online if they lived far, in person if they lived close. I’d keep it innocent at first, playing it off like I was just being nice to them, but then I’d drop hints, plant ideas in their minds, amp the sexual tension. When we all arrived at the hotel for the competition, I’d play hard to get. Make them want me more. Insist it was wrong until the offer came from their mouth instead of mine. A mutual trade.” I fiddled with my hands in my lap. “They’d meet me in my hotel room.” My voice cracked. “And the next day I’d win the competition.”
He let out a gasp, and I cringed, waiting for him to scramble out of the booth. Deem me damaged. Wrong. A slut. A cocktease, like he’d once called me.
But he was still here despite me admitting to basically trading sex for tiaras. By the definition of prostitution, that counted, right? He placed his index finger under my chin and tilted my face upward to meet his eyes. “Did any of them…force themselves…?”
I shook my head. “I would have done anything for the crown and the cash prizes.” Those wins paid my tuition here. All the other girls at this school came from deep bank accounts. I came from lies. “I only started regretting it all later, when I realized how much I was giving up.”
He shrugged. “No harm in doing things to get ahead. Hell, I slept with Genevieve freshman year just to make sure she gave me all the good stories.”
My eyes widened. “Oh my God.” I fanned my hand in front of my face at that news. “Are you still?”
His head moved back and forth fast. “No, it was only once. I just meant that I understand.” He strung his arm around me again and pulled me close. “No judgements.”
I rested my head on his shoulder, biting back a smile. I’d always imagined when I told the guy I liked about my past, it would be the end of things. But he was still here. On the same page as me. “I haven’t been fair to you,” I admitted. “I have a lot of anger management issues aimed at my mother—she hates me for quitting—and I think I’ve been taking it out on you.” My chest twinged with guilt. “I’m sorry.”
He dropped a delicate kiss on my forehead, his way of accepting my apology.
“There, I told you my darkest secret,” I said. “Now it’s your turn to reveal yours.”
“Pretty sure the Genevieve confession counts.” He chuckled.
But I asked the real question that had been pestering me. “What are you really doing with loads of burner phones?”
His jaw twitched and he averted his eyes. “Nothing incriminating. I use them to make cold calls for stories, so the calls won’t be traced back to my phone. My dad really is the CEO of the company that produces them.”
He wasn’t doing anything wrong. There was no dirt to be found. Relief swept through me and I leaned up to kiss him but he tilted his head, forcing my kiss to land on his cheek.
“As much as I want to kiss you,” he said. “I promised you just talking tonight and I intend to keep that promise.”
I let out a growl. “This isn’t going to hep my anger issues,” I said in jest. “What about tomorrow?”
He grinned. “Tomorrow I’m going to kiss you a lot.” He slipped out of the booth and offered me his hand. “Come on.”
I raised a brow at him. “Where are we going?”
“I’m going to help you write that letter to your mother.”
HARRISON BROUGHT ME TO my bedroom. I eyed him warily. “Are you sure we’re only talking tonight?”
He laughed as he shuffled over to my desk and pulled out one of my college ruled notebooks. “Yes.”
I caught a glimpse of my appearance in my full length mirror and nearly had a heart attack. Mascara streaked down m
y cheeks, mixing with the blue sparkles from my eyeshadow. My teased bangs from my pageant costume, now deflated and sticking to my forehead. My ill-fitting mom suit, bunching in all the wrong places. Oh God. I’d not only balled my eyes out to the guy I liked but I’d done it looking like a Halloween costume gone wrong.
I flew to my drawers, plucking out yoga pants and a t-shirt, and excused myself to the bathroom, swiping some concealer and my hairbrush along the way. The concealer did a poor job of hiding the redness swirling my eyes from the tears but combatted the mascara streaks. A top knot bunched on my head fixed my sticky bangs issue. And the tight-fitting t-shirt and yoga pants at least made me feel a little more comfortable in my own skin. I couldn’t be looking like my mother if I was going to actually do this.
When I returned to my room, Harrison was sitting up on my bed, shoes kicked off, pillows propped up in an array behind him. My laptop stand balanced on his knees, notebook and pen resting on top. I thought back to the last time he’d been in my room, when I hadn’t even wanted him to sit in the chair. And now here he was, basically lying in my bed, and all I could think was too bad he was still wearing clothes. He patted the small sliver of space next to him and waggled his brows at me.
I crawled onto the bed and settled in next to him, snuggling close. He strung his non-dominant arm around me. “Do you want to dictate and I’ll transcribe? Or…?” He held out the pen to me.
I could feel his heart beating against my back, in league with my own. His strong arm felt amazing around me, grounding me. The blank notebook page in front of us seemed way too intimidating. My throat started to close. I shook my head. “I—I can’t. I don’t know what to say.” My hands curled in fists at my sides in anticipation of having to sort through my feelings about my mother.
He set down the pen. “I have an idea. I want you to close your eyes.” He swept his fingers over my lids until they closed. “And just talk to me like you did at the pizza place.”
A rattling breath passed through my lips. “I don’t know where to start.”
Harrison’s fingers trailed down my forearm, calming me. “Start with the thing that makes you the angriest.”
“She called me a disappointment,” I choked out. “She said she was disgusted by me.” As soon as the words left my lips, my stomach churned, rage cooking like boiling acid.
He sucked in a sharp breath at that information. “What did you say in response?”
I knew he was just doing what he did best, acting as an Investigative Journalist and asking leading questions to get me to tap into my deepest, rawest emotions, but he sounded a bit like Ms. L. “Nothing. I deleted her emails and texts. She cut me off.”
“What do you wish you said in response?”
“That she’d go fuck herself,” I blurted.
The scratch of his pen on paper made my eyes pop open. He was transcribing away in his messy boy handwriting.
“You’re writing that down?!”
“This isn’t the final letter. I’m just taking notes about what you say and you can sort through the pieces after. Sound good?”
I nodded. It did sound good because for some reason, it was easier to tell him about everything I’d kept inside than force myself to write out the words. I settled into him, resting my head on his chest, and grabbed a fistful of blanket to squeeze. “I do feel like a disappointment. And I am disgusted by myself.” My voice cracked. “But isn’t a mother supposed to love you unconditionally? Respect your wishes and your boundaries? Why did I get so unlucky?”
Hot pressure started at the back of my eyes, stinging and pulsing. A lump lodged in my throat.
“I’d spent years trying to please her. I did everything she asked, because she was my mom and that’s what I’d been raised to do, but it cost me my dignity. My self respect.” I slammed my hand against the mattress. “My virginity. It was her not-so-subtle suggestion to seduce the judges, but I’d complied, because I wanted that crown. For her.”
Harrison pried my hands off the blanket and laced his fingers through mine. “Squeeze my hand when you get angry.”
I squeezed his hand and he let out a yelp, but then I relaxed my fingers. “She’s mad at me for ruining her dream of a star pageant daughter but doesn’t she realize she already ruined my dream? She killed it long ago when she turned the pageants into a competition instead of what I’d signed up for: a bonding experience with my mother. I was a little kid when she first entered me into a pageant and I liked all the attention she gave me, I liked the smile on her face when I won.”
The damn I’d opened up earlier burst and scorching tears slid down my cheeks. I gasped for breath.
“I don’t care about her smile anymore because she doesn’t care about mine. I’m done. She can close my bank account, cut me off. I’d rather stay here alone during winter break than go home. Scratch that, it’s not my home anymore. She’s not my mother anymore, except on paper, the same way my deadbeat dad is.”
I sobbed harder now and Harrison’s arms tightened around me. I kept going, slinging curse words I never had the courage to say to my mother’s face, making vows of never speaking to her again. Each angry slam that escaped my mouth eased the tension that was coiling in my shoulders until I’d run out of things to say. I’d said it all.
When I finally stopped, I felt a sense of relief I hadn’t felt in years. Peace. Harrison dabbed my eyes with a tissue from my nightstand and slid the notebook toward me. On one page, he’d taken a ton of notes. On the other, he’d only written down a few words, but they were powerful.
Disappointed. Disgusted. That’s how I feel about you too.
I smiled, grabbed the pen from his hands, and signed my name along with a note of my own: please don’t contact me again. “I’m going to mail this tomorrow along with the article.”
He lifted his brows. “Article?”
“The one you’re going to write exposing the truths about the pageant world. Keep your source anonymous, of course.” The other students here would never know it was me.
But my mother would know that I was capable of spilling her secret.
Harrison held me all night. Our clothes stayed on. Our lips stayed apart. But he wrapped his arms around me and stroked my back until I fell asleep, my head rising and falling on his chest. I couldn’t wait for morning to arrive and for Harrison to make good on his promise to kiss me a lot. But he had an eight A.M. class, so the only kiss I received was a gentle one on my forehead while I was still groggy. “More later.”
When I finally trudged down to get breakfast, I couldn’t rub the smile off my face. Last night I thought I might never smile again. I stopped short when I spotted Erin at the kitchen table.
She lifted a brow. “So I happened to notice a certain guy leaving your room at six thirty this morning wearing the same outfit as last night. Care to explain?”
Redness crept along my neck. “Nothing happened.”
She clucked her tongue. “Sure it didn’t.”
“No, really, we just talked.”
She clucked her tongue again. “Then I’m disappointed you haven’t taken my advice yet.”
Yet…
Later that day, an email popped up just as I was heading to class. I cringed, bracing myself for one from my mother. But it was from Genevieve instead.
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: URGENT
My heart lurched at seeing Genevieve’s name in my inbox, which usually was a good thing and this one was probably about the raise. It meant another assignment or a congratulatory pat on the back. But now her name jumbled with Harrison’s in my mind and I pictured the two of them…together.
I sucked in a deep breath and clicked on the message.
Swing by my office at three.
That was all it said.
Maybe I’ll run into Harrison while there. I couldn’t wait. As I ambled through the layers of snow blocking me in on the sidewalk, my phone vibrat
ed in my pocket. I clicked the green button with my touchscreen gloves and lifted it to my ear before I could see who was calling. “This is Bianca,” I said warily in case it was Genevieve.
A girlish chuckle filled my ear and my shoulders sagged in relief. Not Genevieve. “I know, silly,” the voice said. “I called you, remember?”
The familiar voice pinged in my mind until I connected it with a face. “Fallon?”
“Wait, should I not have called you? Is it not safe?”
I readjusted the phone to my ear but lowered my voice, hoping Fallon could still hear over the raging wind. “What’s up?”
“I’m in!” Her voice shrieked with excitement and a pang twisted in my stomach. She belonged in our house, not Layla’s.
“Congrats?” I said, and she laughed.
“After the skits, Layla caught up with me and offered me a spot. Obviously she’s only trying to get revenge on you, but she took the bait. I went back with her last night for a post-skit pledge event. It was…intense. And a little strange.”
I reached my class building and took sanctuary in the sweltering lobby. “Good.” I ripped off my scarf before I died of heat exhaustion. “I mean, not for you, but for us.”
“They made us all kneel for hours while each sister—and there are only ten that are already initiated—shouted derogatory comments at us and lobbed us with wet cotton balls. Girls were crying, I just kept rolling my eyes.”
My chest tightened. “Ugh. I’m sorry you had to go through it. Don’t listen to anything they said. They’re wrong. You’re awesome.”
“Obviously!” She laughed. “They really only made jabs about my art and about being friends with you guys. And my no good cheating boyfriend who is actually the sweetest most loyal person on Earth, so whatever.” She took a big breath into the phone. “But I can’t go back to stay with him like I’d planed. They won’t allow it.”