by Rose, L. A.
“So where did you learn how to surf?” I ask, enjoying the way the water glistens on his chest and makes his eyes even bluer.
“It’s always been a hobby of mine. Haven’t gone in a while, though.”
“So show me what you got.” I hop off the surfboard, the water lapping at my calves. “It’ll be a good excuse for me to tan for a minute.”
I sprawl on a towel while he paddles out. Within minutes, he’s caught a wave. I watch in amazement as he balances on the board, soaring through the inner curve of the wave. His tan, toned body flashes through the water like a shooting star.
There’s one thing we haven’t talked about since that night on the boat—the fact that he said he loved me. I haven’t said it back yet. But I think I want to.
I fold a corner of my towel over my head and doze, dreaming soft things. I only wake up when sand scatters across my body. I throw the towel off, expecting to see little kids messing around, and then freeze. I pray I’m experiencing a hallucination brought on by the sun, but no—Sigrid is standing above me, resplendent in a tiny yellow string bikini.
“Well, look who it fucking is,” she sneers. “Piece of advice for you—no amount of tanning is going to make your pasty ass appealing.”
James is still surfing. She hasn’t seen that I’m here with him yet. I brush sand off my stomach, sitting up. “Great to see you too. We really missed you on the booze cruise. We hardly knew what to do without your general aura of bitchiness.”
She doesn’t miss a beat. “Heard you got James to go out with you. What’d you do? Blackmail him? Offer to suck his cock every five minutes until February?”
I spread out my hands. “Apparently, it’s just my personality that he finds appealing.”
“Ah, I see.” She nods, tossing her long red hair over her shoulder. “You gave him some sort of mental illness-inducing drugs. Enjoy it while you have it. He’s only interested in you for the easy sex, obviously. Once he gets tired of it, he’ll toss you out with the trash. That’s what happens with boys who date sluts.”
Fire kindles in me. I stretch languidly to hide it. “He loves me, in fact.”
She laughs so hard that she nearly falls on her ass. “Is that what he told you? How cute that you believed it. Boys don’t ever love girls like you. If you hear that word, it’s because they’re in the mood for sex and they think it’s the magic word that’ll get you to open your legs faster. Open sesame. Guess it worked for you.”
“What the fuck is your problem?” I stand up, shaking sand off myself. In the corner of my eye, I can see James floating on his surfboard, coming down from a wave. She still hasn’t noticed him. “Were you that obsessed with him that you’re completely unable to move on? You never actually loved him—you do realize that, right? Obsession is not love. It’s creepy and stalkerish and he’s better off without you organizing a weird contest for his affection behind his back. He’s better off without you in general.”
A searing impact erupts across my face, snapping my head to the side. It takes me a moment to realize she’s slapped me.
“You,” she hisses, “are a filthy, STD-ridden, mouthy little bitch. I don’t even want James anymore. Like I’d touch a dick that came within a mile of you. If he’s such an idiot that he’ll get with you, I want nothing to do with him.”
Red flashes across my vision and before I even know what I’m doing, I tackle her. We plow into the sand together, me on top. I deliver one well-deserved revenge slap before she grabs my hair and wrenches my head forward, graduating from slaps to full-on punching. My nose bursts in a shower of blood. I wrench my hair out of her grasp and we roll around together, each hitting every inch of the other that we can reach.
“Get off her!”
James’s voice cuts into our epic battle. Suddenly I can breathe again. A shadow is lifted and the sun sears back into my eyelids. I blink, nose aching, as a wet and shirtless James hauls a panting Sigrid off me.
“Are you kidding me?” He thrusts her away. She stumbles back a few steps, hair in disarray, breathing wildly. “Are you crazy?”
“She—she—” She clearly did not see James coming. “You don’t know—you don’t know what—”
He ignores her, turning to me and gently wiping some of the blood from under my nose with the towel. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say, and I can’t help but add a sweet smile. “She’s not a very hard hitter.”
Sigrid smoothes her hair and takes a deep breath, forcibly composing herself, though her hands are still trembling with fury. “James,” she says. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”
“I’m not terribly interested in doing that at the moment, considering you just attacked my girlfriend,” he says coldly.
“She’s a slut.” Sigrid’s voice rings out like an anvil, and I flinch. Such a hard, heartless word. “You shouldn’t be with her, James. You have to know that. She fucked half the school before she met you, and that bullshit with Damien was just that—bullshit. She took him upstairs, she wanted to be with him—”
“Don’t you dare.” His voice is ice from the last circle of hell. A shiver runs through me at the sound of it. I look at him and wish I hadn’t. He’s James from when I first met him, but worse—the James I thought he was, cruel and stone-cold. “Don’t you dare.”
“You’ll regret this.” Her voice is threaded with malice. “Both of you will regret this.”
James takes my hand and silently leads me away.
When we get to the car, neither of us talks for a while. After a few minutes of silence, I speak up.
“She’s the one who got me stuck in that tree.”
He looks up, startled. “What?”
“She and Amber came to my room and got me. They’d put Mags’s inhaler up there with a ladder. Once I was up, they took the ladder away.” I sigh. “I’m sorry I lied.”
“Did she do that…because I spoke to you?” His face is so stunned and furious that I wish he would pull over so I could give him a hug.
“Well,” I hesitate, “she didn’t like me off the bat. She also made me go to that party naked. Although, to be fair, I let her make me—”
“She’s been hazing you. That’s hazing.” He’s so furious. I’m surprised by it.
“That’s why Brooklyn kicked her out.” I look down at my hands. “Thanks for sticking up for me.”
“It’s my fault she had it out for you in the first place.” He groans and rubs his forehead. “I put you through that.”
“That’s not true, James. You know that.” I’m quiet for a minute. “You know what I need? A really fancy, really delicious dinner. If you play your cards right, I just might let you take me out for one.”
A half-smile tugs at his lips. “Where were you thinking?”
He takes me to Cosino’s, a yummy Italian place in Pacific Beach. I eat noodles and drink wine until Sigrid is completely out of my brain. We split a bowl of spaghetti and share the last noodle, Lady in the Tramp-style.
“I was starving,” I announce, letting out a huge burp. “Nothing like a fight with your mortal enemy to hone your appetite.”
He waves the waiter over for the check. “There’s one more place I wanted to take you.”
It’s almost sunset by the time he parks and opens my car door. It’s a park way out on the edge of San Diego, with a series of high steps set into a hill. I find myself panting when we’re halfway up, so he lifts me up on his shoulders and carries me.
“You’re like the world’s sexiest pack mule.” I take two handfuls of his hair and tug gently. “Mush.”
“That’s for sled dogs.” He bats my hands away. “And you’re about to get yourself thrown over the side of this hill.”
At the top, there’s a little flat grassy area with a bench and a single tree. He sets me down and covers my eyes. “Should be just a couple more minutes. Then I’ll let you look.”
I lean into him, breathing in his scent. “Am I going to see Godzilla rising on the hor
izon?”
“No.”
“An airplane trail spelling out the name of the Netflix movie you want to watch when we get home?”
“Not quite.”
“A spaceship getting ready to—”
“Fiona? Just enjoy the silence.”
“I’d rather enjoy you,” I purr, my fingers walking over his thigh.
He makes a noise in his throat. “You’re making it hard to keep my hand still.”
“I’ll rather make you hard in general.”
“There it is,” he says abruptly, and takes his hand away from my eyes.
The sun is setting. Brilliant gold and orange light sears the horizon, scattering across the dips and rises of the California horizon and turning the distant sea into molten gold. The sun is set into the center of it all, a blazing red jewel that looks so close, I could reach out and burn myself on it.
“It’s beautiful,” I sigh.
“It’s the pollution that makes it so beautiful.”
I punch him. “Just enjoy it with me.”
He puts his arm around my shoulders. “I brought you here, didn’t I?”
We stay there in silence together, watching the sky dye itself different colors until darkness slowly crawls over it all. I feel at peace with him. Like there’s nothing either of us are meant to do but be together.
“The fact that I left wasn’t the only reason the show got canceled,” he says quietly, after a while.
I blink. “The show that made you famous?”
He nods. Something intense is weighing on him. “Most people think I quit and that’s why it went off the air. But that’s not quite true. There were three of us who ended up quitting. Me and my two co-stars, a guy and a girl. Ben and Melanie.”
His voice is heavy with sadness, with unmistakable guilt. It goes straight to my heart and I can’t resist the impulse to cover his fingers with mine.
“Ben was my best friend. We went everywhere together. We had the same life—absent father, mother who pushed us into our careers. I was friends with Melanie as well, but I wasn’t nearly as close to her as I was to Ben. Still, we were like a little family, this close circle of people amid all the cameras and the producers and media.”
The stars are beginning to pop out in the sky overhead. For once, I don’t say anything—I just listen.
“One night, the three of us were working late by ourselves, practicing lines. Then Ben got fed up with it and brought out some alcohol. We were sheltered teenagers—it was the first time any of us had gotten drunk. It made me feel sick and sleepy, and so I left early. It was just the two of them.”
His face is stony and hard. I have a strong feeling that this story doesn’t end happily.
“Melanie didn’t come to rehearsal the next morning. Or the morning after. Ben was weird about it, saying she was sick and then that she was flaking out on us. But then Melanie called me and told me something.”
I squeeze his hand tighter.
“She said Ben had raped her that night.”
I flinch. His voice is dead. Still water.
“I confronted Ben. He was horrified. He admitted they’d hooked up, but said it’d been consensual. That Melanie had come on to him. That maybe she was regretting it and that’s why she’d said that to me. He seemed so confused and hurt, and he was my best friend. I told him I believed him.”
His voice is ripe with self-hatred now. He clears his throat and continues. “She wouldn’t come to practice. The show was put on hiatus. She went to her lawyer, but the show’s producers were desperate to keep everything quiet. They didn’t want this story leaking to the media. Eventually, she was paid off and had to sign a nondisclosure agreement. But before she signed it, she came to me. Said nobody would believe her and since I was the only other person there that night, I was her only shot at a witness. She asked if I’d support her if she took it public, took it to court.”
He takes a deep, cold breath. “Ben’s career would be ruined. And I didn’t want to be drawn into the media circus. I told her…I told her that maybe she hadn’t quite got it right. Maybe she was remembering wrong.”
“Oh,” I say softly.
“I’ll never forget the way she looked at me. Like I’d betrayed her worse than anyone ever had, just like Ben. And then she walked out of my life and the public eye. I never saw her again.”
“What made you realize…?”
“She died.” His words get even flatter. “She killed herself. That was when I realized she must have been telling the truth. Her family had tucked her away in a private home, and she was never popular on the show like Ben and I. By the time she passed away, she was so forgotten that her death was a footnote. It was never even reported as suicide. But I knew. Her mom told me.”
He tilts his head back, looking at the stars like he wants to disappear into them. “She died because of me.”
“No. No, no, no.” I grab his arm, holding on to it tightly. “What happened to her wasn’t your fault. Wasn’t anywhere near your fault. You have to understand that. Ben was the one who—”
“What I did was just as bad,” he says quietly. “I was the one she counted on to believe her. She took the buyout because of me.”
“That was why you quit acting.”
“Yeah. I didn’t want anyone staring at me anymore. I didn’t want them to see who I really was.” His voice finally cracks, and it’s almost a relief. Listening to him talk in that voice of nothingness was worse than it would be to listen to him sob.
“It wasn’t your fault.” I press my head into his shoulder. “It was a mistake. You were young.”
“Those excuses don’t matter to Melanie now.”
I finally understand why he nearly lost his mind when Damien attacked me. “You’re different now. Okay? We all make mistakes. I know I’ve made a ton of them. But we change, and we can’t spend our entire lives punishing ourselves for the ways we screwed up when we were different people. That’s not going to help anybody. The only thing you can do is try to make up for your mistakes the best you can and then move on.”
“There’s nothing I can do to make up for that.”
“Yes, there is. And you already did it.” I turn his face toward me. “You saved me. You stuck up for me. If that doesn’t show that you’re a different person now, I don’t know what does. It was someone else who told Melanie he didn’t believe her. You’re not that kid anymore.”
“Someone else?” he repeats slowly.
“The new James would never do something like that.” I kiss him gently, as a reminder that I’m here with him. “So why punish him for it?”
“You don’t…” He struggles to find the words, his eyes searching mine. “You’re not…?”
“Did you think I was going to hear about all that and break up with you?” I laugh. “You’re underestimating how stubborn I am.”
His fingers brush my jawline. “I imagine a lot of people underestimate a lot of things about you.”
“You wouldn’t be wrong there. But listen to me, okay?” I cup his cheek. “Stop looking backward. You can’t build a life in the past. Promise me you’ll look forward from now on.”
Something pleading lives in his eyes as he nods at me. This time, when we kiss, it’s hungry and desperate and beautiful and a hundred other things, all at once.
~20~
“So—has anyone been bothering you about dating James?” says Brooklyn.
It’s Saturday night and I’m at Phi Delta Chi’s latest party. Brooklyn was determined that our parties retain the flavor they’re known for, even without the Games, so this one is animal-themed—we’re all supposed to dress up as our favorite animal. Which means there’s a hell of a lot of slinky black dresses and cat ears.
“Well, Sigrid did punch me at the beach. But that was one time.”
“She punched you?” Brooklyn’s fingers twitch on the stem of her trademark wine glass. “I’ve been trying to talk her through this since I kicked her out. I thought I was finally get
ting through to her. Apparently not.”
“I don’t think she planned it. It was more of a we-ran-into-each-other, happy-coincidence punch. And I haven’t seen her since. I think she might have gotten it out of her system!” I say, trying to be positive. There’s no way it’s out of her system. If you took anger and revenge out of Sigrid’s system, there wouldn’t be anything left.
“Either way, I’m going to talk to her.” She shakes her head and steps out of the way as a drunk cat and a drunker fox stumble past. “Physical violence is unacceptable.”
“Nah, just leave it be,” I say in a rush. “If she hears that I tattled on her, I’ll probably find my bed transformed into a medieval torture device by tomorrow.”
“Fiona!”
A girl stumbles up. It takes me a moment to recognize her, since she’s dressed in a super sexy bunny costume, but then I realize it’s Mags. I’ve never seen her show so much cleavage. Or leg. Or skin in general.
“I want you to meet Terrence,” she manages, shoving some boy’s arm at me. “Have you met Terrence?”
I recognize Batman from the Halloween party. “Right. I remember you. Hi, Terrence.”
“Hi,” he says shyly, and then leans over to whisper something in Mags’s ear. She giggles and her eyes light up. Then she drags him away to dance. I guess finding someone shyer than her was the one thing she needed to break out of her shell.
I turn to Brooklyn, who’s watching the two of them with a slight smile on her face. “Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.” She twirls her wine glass.
“How do you know James?” I ask. “He said that he owed you a favor.”
“I’m sorry, Fiona, I really can’t—”
“Does it have to do with Melanie?” I lower my voice. “Because he told me about that.”
“Ah. Then I suppose I can tell you after all. If you’re going to stay with James, you probably ought to know.” Her voice dips in sadness. “But you have to promise not to pass this on. Or I could get in a lot of trouble.”