Ned shifted, smile tight on the press approaching.
Gray and Gemma had put their phones away, watching us. Though my and Gemma’s relationship was better, and Gray had been decidedly less of a dick, I still didn’t trust it. Old fear scraped at my gut, worried at how they might use this information against me. At the same time, I wasn’t going to let it stop me.
I was done hiding, through pretending, finished caring more about reputation than well-being.
“You know who he is. You’ve seen everything. The evidence—you saw how he treated me. Is our name really that important?”
“Where is this coming from?” Mom asked through clenched teeth.
I saw my future crystal clear and blinding in my mother’s tight smile. Loveless, cold, married to a name not a man. Children who fought for scraps of affection. If I was lucky, I could hold on to the memory of Theo.
“He drugged me. He drugged me, and he probably would have raped me if Theo wasn’t there.”
“Always with the melodrama,” my mom sighed.
Just a month ago I would have given in to this marriage, given up and into a life that was less than in so many ways.
“Nothing I do will ever be good enough for you,” I whispered. “For this family.” She probably couldn’t hear it above the seagulls and crash of the waves, but it was more to myself than her.
Because that was when I finally understood she would never love me the way I needed. None of my family could. We were all too fucking broken. We were jagged facsimiles of a family. When we tried to love one another, we cut.
Tansy Crowne honestly didn’t see the problem with marrying me to someone like Ned for the rest of my life.
It was what she’d had to do, after all, what we all were expected to do.
But that was the moment I did.
“Fuck you all.” I tried to rip the tiara off, but it had been bobby pinned to the point of superglue. I yanked and yanked until my hair ripped out. “Fuck this family and fuck you.”
If I could’ve thrown the tiara at Ned, I would’ve.
In the end I walked away, tiara still on but lopsided, my head aching.
I ran past the paparazzi clamoring for a photo. I ran and ran, under the pier and down the beach, until my heart would give out, but eventually I escaped them, hiding behind the pier’s wooden columns. I watched as a few vultures sprinted by me, assuming I’d gone toward Main Street.
When the last of them had disappeared down the street, I turned to go somewhere else—anywhere else—and ran headfirst into someone’s chest. He was already walking in the opposite direction down the sandy shore when I looked up. Even far away, even with his back to me, I knew him too well. His tall, slightly slouched shoulders. The sheen on his wavy chestnut hair.
“Theo?”
He paused, then kept walking.
“Theo, wait.”
I was propelled after him, latching onto his bicep. He turned around, and when he did, I nearly lost my breath. His stare was harsh, his jaw hard. Those green, green eyes were so pained. With the sunlight behind him, he looked like a fallen angel.
“You were just going to keep walking?” All the strength in my voice was gone. “Like you’d never seen me before?”
The words my family had said were fresh in my mind. Theo was down in the most deserted part of the beach, and there was no reason to be here. But above us, I could see the black satin elbows of my brother’s bomber jacket, my sister leaning over the edge, lips twisted in a bored pout.
Has he been watching me? Following me? Taking care of me?
He leaned forward, and I closed my eyes foolishly, breathing him in, as if he was going to kiss me.
There was too much water between us.
I couldn’t trust him, but I couldn’t hate him either.
A salty, breezy moment passed before I opened my eyes. He was feeling the sharp point of my tiara. So sharp it had cut many maids. His eyes were on me. Soft. Sad. So not the boy who’d broken me just a week ago.
“Are you happy?” he asked.
Theo knew better than anyone this was my dream come true. My hair was messy from trying to rip the fucking tiara off my head. I’d been all but forced into the shower yesterday. Ned was above us, hidden from view like the cockroach he was. Each second another piece of my heart sloughed off like papier-mâché.
I’m sleeping with the light on again.
“Yes,” I lied.
The one time I wanted him to catch me in a lie, he just nodded to himself.
“Your party, it was good?” he asked. “You got the presents?”
“I didn’t get a chance to open them,” I admitted.
He pulled his hand from the tiara until he was almost touching my cheek. I could feel the whisper of his fingers on my skin. I just needed to step forward and he would caress me like he had a hundred times before.
Why did you lie to me?
Why did you leave me?
Why won’t you come back?
“Truth or promise, Theo?” My words were barely a whisper.
His brow furrowed. I was sure he would say no, leave me dangling on the spiderweb of lies and half-truths we’d built.
“Truth,” he said.
“Did you lie to me when… at the ball?”
Theo clenched his jaw so hard the muscle twerked, watching me with a such a painfully intense stare my belly ached, and then his fingers brushed my forehead. I closed my eyes again as he pushed a strand of hair behind my ear with a tenderness so opposite the tension in his body.
“Yes,” he finally said.
I opened my eyes. “Why?”
“It’s my turn.”
“I don’t care. Why?”
“It was the only way I could think to protect you.”
Frustration built, water rising and stuck in a fire hydrant. What did that even mean? How did this protect me? Then I thought to the four mysterious guards who appeared overnight. The new alarm. The conversation I thought I’d dreamed up between him and my mother.
I knew my mom was involved somehow. She’d been the one to assign the guards, to have the new alarm installed. Our love lay brutally massacred, and her fingerprints were all over the crime scene.
I just didn’t know how, I didn’t know why, and I didn’t want to believe it, that Theo could have stomped my heart into a hamburger for something so pointless.
“Did you even think about what it would do to me? Did you care? Four guards…” I tried not to laugh, to ease the bitterness blacking out my heart. His touch was light on my neck, and it would be so easy for him to grab my neck, crush me to his lips. “You’re better than any number of guards.”
His fingers tightened. “It wasn’t just guards, Abigail.”
I stared into his eyes, trying to figure out what would have made Theo tell such a horrible lie, all in the name of protection. What could my mom have offered him?
In the end, I couldn’t think of anything.
“I don’t know what trade you made, but it wasn’t worth it. In every scenario, you’re worth the risk.”
His grip tightened on my neck, pulling me until our lips were so close to colliding, but there was no heat in his eyes.
“I’m not worth it, Abigail,” he gritted. “I could never ask you to risk your life for someone like me.”
It was a while before I responded, the wind blowing.
“I know,” I whispered. “You would never ask.”
He searched my eyes, then dropped me.
My skin was colder than before he’d touched me. I could too clearly remember the heat of his touch, his breath warming my lips. He exhaled with so much force his shoulders moved, and I knew he was going to leave. Going to God knows where. I didn’t know when I was going to see him again.
“Truth or promise,” I asked. “Do you still love me?”
His eyes were hard. “I’ll never stop.”
My eyes were watering, his image blurring. No matter how much focus I put on keeping my chin up, my ba
ck straight, I couldn’t keep the tears away.
“T-Truth or promise.” My voice was shaky with unshed tears. “Would you do it again?”
Say no. Say you regret everything you did to us.
“Yes.”
His answer knocked the wind from me. I couldn’t stop him from leaving, too busy trying to breathe. So I watched him walk away, his footsteps disappearing in the tide.
I was desperate for anything to make him come back.
“Your mom,” I yelled at his back. “Um… I have her address… I know you don’t want it… but…”
He stopped. This was so not the way I wanted to tell him. I rubbed my forehead, anxiety spiking with each silent minute. The tide kept coming in and going out, washing the sand anew. Then he turned to face me.
He was still silent. About a foot of sand separated us. Wind whipped his wild, silky brown hair around his sharp, beautiful face.
“She’s been looking for you,” I said. “You’re hard to find, since she wasn’t the one to give you your name. Hers is Miranda Lemaire, and she lives in town. You can find her online easily. She’s been here the whole time.”
He looked like he wanted to say something, and my heart stood on tiptoes. Then his eyes lifted over my shoulder, and he turned from me, walking away without another word.
I looked to where he had and saw my mother. She had black sunglasses on, but her arms were folded, and she was looking in my direction. Theo left because he was protecting me, but there was only one person who could provide such thick armor he’d leave my side. I stared at my mother, a realization curling in my gut.
I hadn’t been back at Crowne Hall for even an hour before I went to my sister’s room, kicking open her door.
“What did he give you?” I asked, not waiting for her to let me in. The question wouldn’t stop plaguing me. It felt like it was the secret key that would unlock everything.
“What could Theo Hound possibly have given you to make you trade your dress and kiss him publicly—”
I stopped short. Grim was in my sister’s room. Grim, the scary head of four guys who used to sit atop lunch tables, smoking and glaring, scaring teachers as much as they had the student body. Now he led them as the Horsemen gang, controlling any and all crime in Crowne Point.
Seeing me, Gemma startled. “Abby!”
Grim, on the other hand, barely reacted to my presence. His dark eyes glanced in my direction, then he moved to leave, brushing past me without a word.
“I…” I trailed off, noting the item in his hand.
Theo’s mom’s diary.
I snatched it without thinking. Keyword: without thought.
Grim was scary in high school; he was scarier now.
He was tall, tattoos decorated tan skin spiraling up his neck. Wild, inky black hair fell over his eyes. He reminded me a little of the grim reaper, which was fitting.
But this was the last piece of Theo’s mom. An item Theo rarely let me see, let alone touch, was in a stranger’s hands.
“Abigail, stop!” Gemma ripped it out of my hands, shoving it into Grim’s. “Theo gave this to me.”
Grim turned it over in his hand, then gave me another one of those barely interested looks from down his nose.
I had to watch helplessly as he disappeared with Theo’s mom’s diary.
“See you soon, rich girl.” Grim’s smooth, amused voice trickled back. It lingered like smoke.
Gemma stared after him, lips parted, as if caught in a spell.
“What the fuck? Was that who I think it was?”
She looked away. “I don’t know.”
“Why does he have Theo’s mom’s diary? Why did you?”
“I told you, it’s what he gave me, and I was trying to pay off my massive, Abigail’s muffin-top-sized debt.”
Her insult had my Gemma Defenses rising so quick, I nearly didn’t catch the most important part of what she’d said.
Why would Theo trade the one thing left of his mother so he could lie to me and ruin us?
“Did he really?”
Neither Gemma nor I had moved since Grim left, feet planted in her plush rug near the door. I stared in her blue eyes, willing her to be honest with me, trying to trust her despite the rusty beams propping up our sisterhood.
She slowly nodded.
Fuck.
I officially welcomed myself to her room for the second time in as many years, going to her bed.
“Why did the Horsemen want it?”
She shrugged. “They don’t tell you that.”
Gemma had her hair cut cleaned up, and now it sat just above her shoulders. It was all at once chic and grunge, totally in style. I tried not to be jealous, because we were trying to be better about that.
I fell to my back, head landing flat on her comfy sheets. “The more truth I learn, the more I don’t understand. The lie was easier. It made sense.”
Gemma had a pretty ceiling with gilded molding and a crystal chandelier. The crystal drops refracted soft, yellow light. I wanted to know everything that led Grim to be in our house, but I knew Gemma wouldn’t tell me anything.
Of all the people to have it, he was the worst. The one person that couldn’t be bribed. The one person neither beholden to law nor above it, but below it, untouchable in its seedy underbelly.
“You’re not really going to end up dead? Right?”
“No.” She laughed. “That would be too easy. I’ll be fine…”
The way she trailed off had me staring at her.
She cleared her throat. “I’m Gemma Crowne. There is no one scarier than me.”
“I’ve kicked your ass a couple times.”
“You wish.”
My phone buzzed with a notification, a new email.
Dear Abigail, we are pleased to inform you you’ve been accepted…
An acceptance letter to the college of my dreams, for this fall semester. Except, I’d never applied to college. I didn’t know what to do with this information, or how to process it.
When my mother had thrown all the pamphlets in the trash, a part of me accepted my dream had gone with it.
There was only one person who knew enough to apply for me, and would do something like this for me. My heart cracked with the knowledge.
I left Gemma, my head swirling too much to continue talking. I kept thinking why? I was sandwiched between Theo’s cruel deeds and sweet actions, jagged on one side and pillowy soft on the other.
I went to my room and dragged my box out from its spot. I had one secret left, one neither Mother nor Theo knew about. Inside were pastel beads, beads I should’ve left abandoned like he’d abandoned me. Instead, in my ruined dress, I climbed on the floor, grasping into the shadows, until I’d recovered every last one… well, except for one. I couldn’t find the F for forever.
And it still ate at me.
I carried my box to the balcony, swinging my legs over the edge, looking at the pastel pieces. They were all broken apart, but they were still there. That was how I felt. Broken apart, but impossibly in love with him.
AC + TH
I traced the letters. I was pretty sure I knew what happened. Theo did what he always did—he protected me. He protected me in the only way he knew how, like the time he tried to get Gemma to tell him he wasn’t good enough for me.
Theo sacrificed himself.
When would he trust that he was more than good enough for me? That he didn’t need to keep leaving me? I was the one who didn’t deserve someone like Theo.
I still didn’t know how he’d protected me, and what made him leave me… again. I pushed the beads around, and they rolled to the unevenly weighted corners.
There was something that’s been bugging me, something Theo said that has been sticking like a thorn in my side. He said I abandoned him. I would never do that…
But I knew somebody who would, and seeing her at the beach pushed the thorn deeper. I still wanted to believe my mom loved me, and that love meant she wanted me to be happy.
Of all the things that hadn’t made sense—Theo sleeping with Gemma, Theo stabbing a knife in my open wound, Theo leaving, Theo lying about it all—my mom being the cause fit perfectly.
Mom was sitting in her favorite room, in a chaise against the now-dark window.
“Why did Theo leave?” I asked. “All those years ago, why did he go work for Papa?”
I’d never asked her. I’d never thought to ask her. I saw him with Gemma, and I assumed he didn’t want to be around me anymore.
“I was protecting you,” she said simply, without looking up from her book.
I was getting real fucking sick of people protecting me.
I barely whispered my question. “Is that why he left again? Did you make some kind of deal?”
She looked up, eyes slowly finding mine. “You were never going to marry Theo, Abigail.”
I had to swallow every emotion. Rage, betrayal, anger at myself for being so foolish.
“You were protecting you.” The truth was charcoal on my tongue. “You let me believe Gemma was better than me. You let me believe Theo loved her. No… you made it impossible for me to believe anything else.”
The pain came out of me jagged and rough, and I stumbled, grasped the back of one of the two wingback chairs between us to keep from falling over.
“All this time it’s been about you, your insecurity, your need. I wanted your approval so badly it kept me up at night. It destroyed my chance at love, but you never wanted me to win. You just wanted to keep watching me lose.”
I gripped the wingback until the fibers groaned against my nails.
“Why?” I probed. “Because I was happy? Because I still had my Theo?”
Mom looked away. In all my life I’d never witnessed my mother avert her eyes or show any kind of weakness. Her jaw was tight, and she swallowed roughly. For a brief, blinding second, I thought I would see some of my mother’s humanity.
Real humanity.
But as quickly as it came, it vanished.
“That’s quite the story you wove,” she said coolly.
Vote Then Read: Volume II Page 209