Because I’m such a fool.
“Pull yourself together, Thorne,” I tell myself. “You can do this. He’s just a guy. A very hot…very tall…very good-looking…asshole.” I thump my head against the steering wheel and accidentally honk the horn.
I jerk back in my chair, and quickly turn off the car.
Okay.
Amara up, Rosie. You can do this.
Just march in there, like Amara’s gonna march on the Prospero in the second movie, and take no shit from Vance Reigns. You have one goal, and he isn’t it. And you’re free of your crutches. You are strong and independent and—
I take a deep steadying breath, grab my bookbag, and get out of the car.
Breathe in, breathe out.
You’ll be okay. Just go in, do your job.
When I get to the door, I let myself in with the key under the mat. I dump my bookbag on the barstool where I always do, but Mr. Rodriguez is nowhere to be found. Usually, if he’s gone when I come in, he leaves a note on the counter, but there isn’t one today.
I wonder where he is.
“Mr. Rodriguez?” I call, wandering into the living room. I step outside onto the back patio with the pool, but he’s not back here either, and neither is Sansa.
Where could they be?
I turn and grab the handle for the sliding glass door—but it won’t budge. I try again. The door rattles.
And I realize: I’ve locked myself out.
A rumble of thunder rolls overhead.
“ELIAS?” I CALL THROUGH THE HOUSE, but no one replies. I could have sworn I heard the front door open. But he isn’t in the kitchen, and no one is in the library, so perhaps Rosie isn’t here either. Did she decide to quit?
“Elias,” I call again, stepping out into the backyard. The humid fall air is so thick it feels like walking into a mouth. The day is dark with thunderclouds, purple and heavy with rain. In the distance, the clouds rumble. I don’t want to be out here longer than I already am. It looks like it might rain any moment. “Elia—”
From the pool area, Rosie scrambles from one of the chairs, pale and wide-eyed. “No! Don’t close the—”
The door slides shut behind me.
“—door…” she finishes glumly.
Why would she not want me to…oh. My stomach drops into my toes as I spin around and try the door. But it’s locked. I can’t believe this. How stupid can I be? I sigh and turn back to her. “I assume it was you I heard coming in?” I say.
“Probably,” she replies, nervously twisting the class ring on her finger.
“And you haven’t seen Elias either, have you.”
She shakes her head. So that means he hasn’t broken the news to her yet, either. Great. I curse under my breath and give one last tug. Still nothing. The glass in the door rattles with the force.
We are officially locked outside.
“Maybe the front door is unlocked by some glorious twist of fate,” I mutter, realizing that I don’t even have shoes on, and start for the side of the house.
“I’ve already tried it. Can we talk?”
I ignore her.
“Vance.”
When she says my name, I can’t help but to stop. I glance over my shoulder at her. The clouds above us rumble again. “What could we possibly have to talk about?”
“You—you wish you’d never found out it was me, don’t you,” she forces out, and fists her hands. She raises her eyes to me defiantly. “Because I’m not who you imagined, am I?”
I roll my eyes. “Right, that’s it—”
“I’m being serious!”
“And I’m—”
She grabs my arm roughly and jerks me around to face her, and squares her shoulders so she looks a little taller. Imogen was right—I know she was—I should have told this girl the moment I recognized that birthmark on her neck, but I purse my lips and look away. There are few things I enjoy less than confrontation.
“Am I?” she repeats. She steps up to me, and I ease back a little from our closeness. The freckles across her nose look like a constellation, and my eyes follow them down the dip of her nose to her bowlike mouth. She’s strangely intimidating, like a squirrel with a butcher knife.
“N-no, that’s not it,” I find myself replying. “I didn’t tell you because—”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s because—”
“—you’d realize that it was—”
“—you found out that it was—”
“—me,” we finish at the same time.
My eyebrows furrow. Her hazel eyes widen.
A crack of thunder streaks across the purple clouds, followed by a chest-rattling clap of thunder, and a raindrop lands on my cheek.
ANOTHER CRACK OF LIGHTNING streaks across the sky, and I tense up. I don’t think. I grab Vance by the arm and tug him toward the pool house.
There is a brief moment of buzzing—wind rips through the trees. Then a sheet of rain, a gray wall of it, comes rushing across the yard. I throw my hands over my head to try to stop it, but I’m drenched in a matter of seconds. I just got my cowlick tamed, too. Vance is just as soaked, his thin white T-shirt stuck to his body like a second skin.
I shove my shoulder against the pool house door, praying it isn’t locked. The door gives—thank God!—and we stumble inside. It’s a small shed with a few pieces of furniture covered in plastic. The light switch on the left doesn’t work, and the entire place smells like pollen and timber. The rain pounds against the roof like pebbles.
At least it’s dry.
When he clears his throat, I come to my senses and quickly let go of him. Crap, I’m now stuck in a pool house with Vance for God knows how long, and he’s in a very wet shirt that clings to every curve of his broad shoulders and—
Stop it, Rosie, he’s a jerk. You don’t like jerks.
No, but I can still appreciate the view.
“The storm should pass soon, I think,” I say, trying to get my mind off him.
“Mmh,” he replies, and wanders over to one of the plastic-wrapped pieces of furniture and finds a barstool. He pulls the plastic off it, drags it up to the window, and sulkily sits down. Water drips from his shirt onto the cement floor, and a shiver runs through his entire body. He rubs his arms to keep out the chill.
Even though it’s the end of September, climate change hit us with some late storms—probably the outer bands of Hurricane Diana. There are mounds and mounds of boxes behind the plastic-wrapped couch, so I figure there has to be a blanket (or at least an old towel) in one of them—and hopefully no snakes. Or spiders. God, I hate spiders.
I glance over his way as he sifts through the junk. Do you actually mean it? I want to ask. That I wasn’t the reason you didn’t tell me who you were?
But I don’t know how to begin, so I busy myself looking through the boxes, opening one after the other, finding Christmas ornaments and Valentine decorations and Fourth of July banners from years and years past. I take out the head of a Santa Claus—just the head, not the body—before dropping it back into the box and moving on.
Creeeeeepy.
What is more unsettling, however, is the silence between us. Usually we’re bickering—or at least snapping at each other—but this sort of heavy quiet is the worst.
Vance must think so too, because he finally says, “I didn’t mean for you to get the wrong idea. It’s not because of you I didn’t tell you.”
“You don’t have to spare my feelings—”
“I’m not,” he replies, turning to face me. He’s wringing the bottom of his shirt out, like he’s nervous. Him—nervous? Lightning must’ve struck me while I was outside. I must be dead. “I recognized the birthmark on your neck. It looks a little like a rose, so that’s how I remembered it. It’s cute.”
Cute. I touch my birthmark beneath my ear, so glad it’s dark enoug
h for him not to see me blushing like mad. I dig further into the box and find a blanket.
“And I realized that I had already been terrible to you—well, that I’d just been terrible, period—and I didn’t know what else to do. And, I think a part of me was afraid that if you found out it was me, you would go to the tabloids, and I do not need that right now. I’m here because of the tabloids. But…” He takes a deep breath. “I think the real reason was, though, was that I was afraid that if you found out it was me you would be…”
“That I would be…?” I insist, turning to him.
He hesitates and sits down on a pool chair. “…Disappointed.” His voice is so soft, like the whisper of a secret. I drag the blanket out of the box and crouch in front of him. He hesitates a look at me, cornflower blue eyes framed by blond eyelashes.
“That’s funny,” I say with a soft laugh, “because I thought you were disappointed that it was me.”
He shakes his head. “No, never. You’re perf—”
I toss the blanket over his head. It’s an instinctive reaction. Like flinching away from a punch. Or screaming at a spider. But this is different. It’s a compliment I want to hear, but don’t, because while he sounds sincere, I don’t know how much of him I trust.
At least not yet.
“Your man-nips said you were cold,” I say, probably the least romantic thing I can think of, and leave him with the blanket.
He pulls it behind his head. He looks like he wants to say something else, but thank God he drops the romantic act. “Where did you find this?”
“In a box labeled ‘Dead Grandma’—kidding. Over there.”
“It looks dirty.”
“It probably is.”
He frowns, but it’s too cold not to take it. He wraps it around his shoulders even though he clearly doesn’t want to.
I shiver, but there was only one blanket in the box and I gave it up for the cause.
“You’re cold,” he says.
“Nah,” I reply. There’s a refrigerator into the corner, and though it’s not plugged in, it’s stocked, and I take out one of the sodas. A Coke. I don’t know if sodas expire but why not. I drag up a barstool next to him and look out the window at the pouring rain. He eyes the Coke. “Where did you find that?”
“The fridge. Wanna try it?”
“Definitely not.”
I shrug and pop open the tab. There is a little less fizz than usual. I sniff it. It doesn’t smell rotten. I take a tentative sip, and it tastes like absolute ass, but I try to rein in my disgust and offer it to him again.
“C’mon, it’s pretty good.”
“If you poison me…” he warns me, and takes a swig of the Coke. “Bloody hell,” he sputters, and quickly gives the soda back. “That tastes like motor oil!”
“It’s terrible,” I agree. “I’m pretty sure it expired like ten years ago.”
“And you made me try it.”
“You chose to,” I point out.
“I was peer pressured,” he replies indignantly, and we fall quiet.
We sit there in front of the window, watching sheets of rain cascade over the backyard, graying almost everything—the way a really heavy rain tends to do. Sansa is jumping across the yard, trying to eat the rain, as if she’s never seen water fall from the sky before. The thunder doesn’t even faze her.
I close my eyes and listen as another rumble rattles the small pool house. “My mom loved thunderstorms,” I say. I don’t know why I say it. I don’t know why it matters.
After a moment, he replies, “So did my dad.”
A flash of light—and then another rolling, long rumble of thunder.
“You, too?” I ask, but really I say, You have a hole in your heart as well?
He nods. “My biological father. I didn’t know him very well, though. He died when I was pretty small, before I became the patron saint of disappointment.”
I tilt my head, looking at him—really looking, for the first time since I met him. It’s strange because I’ve memorized what he looks like from all of the promo posters and the movie trailers, but it doesn’t hit me until just then how…human he looks. It’s easy to forget that he isn’t even eighteen yet. He’s been in the spotlight since he was a kid. I watched him grow up in the newspapers and on television shows. His father—stepfather, I guess—is the CEO of some big Hollywood studio, and his mother is one of those gorgeous philanthropists you see heading charities in Las Vegas and LA. He didn’t make it big, though, until his role on The Swords of Veten Rule, and by then he was already being treated like the adult actors who work beside him, so I hardly thought of him as someone my age. Someone who needed to make some mistakes to figure out how to make fewer of them.
And that reminded me of a conversation I had with him that night at ExcelsiCon. “Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped,” he had said, picking around the onions in our hash browns. “I have these expectations on my shoulders, and I just keep screwing up and disappointing everyone.”
“Well, you haven’t disappointed me yet,” I had replied, propping my head on my hand as I leaned on the table.
He gave a sad sort of smile behind his mask. “It’ll just be a matter of time.”
Is that why you didn’t tell me? I want to ask. Because you thought that I would be disappointed? I know he didn’t mean to run off the road with Elle Wittimer, and I know he didn’t mean to break up her and Darien, and I begin to wonder, when are you able to learn and grow from a mistake—and when does it haunt you for the rest of your life?
As if he can sense what I’m thinking, he says quietly, almost too quiet to hear over the rain, “I didn’t want this. Any of this. I make so many mistakes, and I ruin so many things. I guess that’s why…back at ExcelsiCon, I didn’t want us to take off our masks. I didn’t want to ruin things because I think I—” But then he stops himself, and shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter.”
And, for a moment, the mask of Vance Reigns drops, and there’s just a boy sitting here beside me, orange hair and too-blue eyes, looking more tired than he should.
I want to reach out and comfort him, but I curl my fingers into fists in my lap and keep them there. He was about to admit to me that I was perfect, but I can’t say I feel the same about him. So what right do I have to reach out?
“You know…” I find myself saying. The rain is beginning to let up a little, a shaft of sunshine streaking through the sky beyond. “I like you when you aren’t being a spoiled, selfish jerk.”
He puts half of the blanket over my shoulder as I shiver again, and I quietly grab the edge, resigned to share the smelly, moldy blanket with him. “Maybe because you’re not being as stubborn and insufferable as you usually are.”
I roll the words over my teeth before I finally voice them. “We could…call a truce? I mean, I’ll be working here for at least another few weeks, and honestly, I’d rather not hate you. So…what do you say?”
“It’s not impossible,” he replies, and turns his cornflower gaze to me. There’s a glimmer of amusement there that makes my heart kick in my rib cage. It’s nothing, I tell myself.
It’s nothing at all.
I CAN’T LET ELIAS FIRE HER.
I realize it as the rain lets up and we abandon the pool shed into the muggy afternoon sun. She’s out the door first, stretching her arms wide as the sunlight hits her face. The rays catch in her brown hair, turning it to copper. There is a cowlick in her fringe that curls up at an odd angle, and I find myself fixated on it.
For someone so odd and infuriating, how did things change? And it would feel so awkward to tell her now—that oh, today was supposed to be your last day, pack up your things, you’re gone—after I spent the better half of the afternoon with her. It strikes me then—out of the blue, like a bolt of lightning—how much of an insufferable jerk that actually makes me.
And while tha
t realization surprises me—the fact that I am a jerk doesn’t.
A knife twists in my chest.
I’m ashamed, and quickly I pry my eyes down to the wet grass. The humidity clings to me, and the embarrassment crawling up my cheeks just makes me more uncomfortable.
Why am I so embarrassed?
She squints at the sky. “That was such an unexpected way to spend the afternoon.”
“Bad unexpected or…?”
“Are you fishing for a compliment?”
My shoulders stiffen. “Of course not.”
The edges of her lips quirk up into a smile. “I’m not sure what kind of afternoon it was yet.”
But it wasn’t bad, at least, I think, and as I do it makes my shame run deeper. Because why do I think I can enjoy an afternoon with a girl who I’ve all but insulted for the last week? I open my mouth to ask her when the sliding glass door opens and Elias pokes his head out. “There you two are! Dios mío, I thought you’d killed each other—why are you wet?”
Rosie laughs. “We locked ourselves out.”
Elias tsks. “Both of you? That’s a surprise. Come on inside and get warm so you don’t catch a cold. And Rosie, I need to speak with—”
“No!” I interrupt quickly. She gives me a strange look. So does Elias. I add, quickly, racking my brain for some excuse to my outburst, “No, we…won’t catch a cold. Because Rosie found a blanket?”
That was terrible. I should feel ashamed.
But I hope Elias understands. He gives me a one-eyebrow-raised look, and then he smirks in that I told you so way. “Well, I’m glad you found a blanket. I have to get the groceries out of the car, so let yourselves inside, unless you want share that blanket a little longer,” he says, and leaves the sliding door open for us.
I am mortified.
Rosie, for her part, seems oblivious as she runs her hands through her wet hair. “I should probably get going. I told Dad I’d eat some chocolate murder pancakes with him tonight.”
Bookish and the Beast Page 13
