Bookish and the Beast

by Ashley Poston

  I turn around and send my mother—again—to voice mail. “Your chariot awaits, Princess.”

  HE LEADS ME OUT INTO THE GARAGE, where a simple economy car sits. I buckle myself into the passenger seat. It surprises me—I didn’t think he’d be caught dead in anything less than an Aston Martin, but I suppose that would stick out too much in this town.

  Out on the main street, trees unfurl around us, curling up toward the sky in a tunnel. He flicks on the brights, the radio murmuring soft pop songs.

  He shifts in his seat. “So, if I liked that book…which one would you suggest next?”

  I give him the strangest look. “Seriously?” I chew on the inside of my cheek to keep myself from smiling.

  “…What?”

  “I’m sorry—this is just so weird. I never would’ve thought that I’d ever be in a car with you, asking me for book recs.”

  “Well, I will admit this is a first for me as well. But…” As he coasts to a stop at the stoplight, he tilts his head, frowning, “it’s not a bad thing, yeah?”

  “No, it’s really not. Well, what kind of books do you like?”

  “Ones that aren’t boring.”

  “Well, that’s all of them.”

  He gives me a sideways glance, and I smile and pull out my notebook from my school bag. “Fine—how about court intrigue? Assassins? Starship battles? The Star Brigade is a good one to start with.” I scrawl the name out onto the top of a spare piece of paper, tear it off, and hand it to him.

  “Thank you kindly,” he replies, and tucks it into the fold in his beanie.

  I shove my notebook into my backpack. “You know,” I say, and hesitate for a moment, before I continue, “I like this.”

  “This?”

  “We aren’t sniping at each other for once.”

  “I know, it’s ghastly,” he replies with a laugh. A moment later, the light turns green, and we drive on. “We should at least be arguing.”

  “I know, you’re a terrible villain.”

  “I like to think of myself as an anti-hero.”

  “Byronic? Take a left here,” I add as we come to the next stoplight, and he turns onto my street. I tap on the window, indicating my apartment building on the right.

  “I am not nearly that broody, thank you,” he says as he slows down in front of the entrance to the building. It’s nothing like his castle-house. It’s a three-story walkup apartment complex with a smaller-than-normal kitchen and a leaky toilet, but it’s home.

  “Not broody? Now I know you’re lying.”

  He mocks a gasp. “And I thought we were friends!”

  Friends. I like the sound of that, strange enough, even after I turned him down for a date. But a friendship—one between him and me, Vance Reigns and Rosie Thorne—doesn’t sound too terrible. I lean across the middle console toward him and when he looks back at me my breath catches in my throat, because his eyes are so blue and he smells so warm, and for a brief moment—I can see him.

  The boy I fell for on the balcony of ExcelsiCon.

  “There you are,” I whisper. The words slip out of my mouth before I can reel myself in. His eyebrows furrow, and I quickly pull myself back and push open the car door. “Good night, Vance.”

  “See you tomorrow?” he calls.

  “Tomorrow,” I promise.

  He waits until I’m inside my apartment before he drives away, out of the gates, and onto the main street again, but my heart never stops racing.

  I CAN’T REMEMBER THE LAST TIME I woke up before noon, but I didn’t actually sleep very well. My stupid brain kept replaying last night over and over—like the theater previews before a film. I saw her every time I closed my eyes, illuminated by the soft light of the dashboard, fiddling with the radio even though she never picked a channel, just so I wouldn’t notice the blush across her cheeks.

  But I definitely did.

  It could have nothing to do with you, I think as I fish for a shirt in my dresser drawer, my hair damp against my neck from a shower.

  But still.

  I wish I’d said something—something remotely flirty, I guess—but instead I made up cat puns. And the way she laughed, and smiled, and leaned over the console in the middle—

  There you are, she had said, as if she’d been looking for me underneath Vance Reigns this whole time.

  I scrub my head, abandoning any hope of finding a clean shirt, and pace my bedroom. Oh, I’m in so much trouble. I have half a mind to ask Imogen what to do, until I remember that we haven’t talked since our fight, and I haven’t seen her online since.

  I really did bungle that up, didn’t I?

  Elias knocks on the door before he pokes his head in. “Hey, sleepyhead—oh, you’re awake.”

  Sansa squeezes through the crack in the door and jumps at me, tail wagging. “Oof! Easy, girl.”

  I scrub Sansa behind the ears, and she thwaps down on the carpet and rolls over for me to pet her belly.

  “So, did anything…happen last night?”

  “What? No, we didn’t fight or anything, if that’s what you mean.” I grab a button-down shirt from the clean-laundry basket and put it on. It’s wrinkled, but it isn’t like I am going to impress anyone today.

  Rosie doesn’t care about wrinkled shirts.

  …Does she?

  “That is not what I mean,” Elias replies as he comes into my room and sits down on the edge of the bed. “Now, tell me all about it. I can see it on your face. You’ve got something on your mind.”

  I give a one-shouldered shrug. Sansa nudges my hand when I stop petting her, and I resume with the scratches. “I just…I don’t know, honestly. I like her, but do I deserve to?”

  Words aren’t usually this hard, are they? I like you. I want to date you. Okay, let’s bone. That’s the extent of my relationship vocabulary, which now, come to think of it, is wholly lacking in…literally everything.

  “I want so badly to be part of something again,” I say slowly, trying to figure out exactly how I feel. “To care about something. And we both know that I don’t. Back in LA, I rarely cared about anything. I didn’t need to, or maybe I was just afraid to, I don’t know. And once I return to the real world, to being me, there’s no way that someone like her and someone like me…”

  I frown.

  Because that’s the root of it, isn’t it? She deserves so much better than anyone I could ever be.

  “¡Ay mijo!” he says, shaking his head. “You’re falling hard.”

  I put my face in my hands. “Oh God, I am, aren’t I? What do I do?”

  He puts a hand on my shoulder.

  “I just want her to be happy,” I mutter, realizing it’s true the moment I say it. Because every time I close my eyes, I see the way she looks at that library full of stories, and I’ve never seen anyone look so hopeful and alive and…home, somewhere before.

  There’s a warmth in my chest—it’s been there for a while now—that is soft and sure, and I realized last night, as I watched her walk into her apartment, what the feeling was.

  Happiness.

  The kind I’ve never felt before.

  And that’s when I get the idea.

  “Elias, do you have Natalia’s number? Can I have it?”

  He gives me a peculiar look, but he doesn’t ask why.

  I WILL NEVER TELL VANCE REIGNS THIS, but I wake up to him every morning.

  Literally.

  Because on my wall is a fanart poster of Ambrose Sond, shirtless and more than a little disheveled, one hand behind his head, the other snaking underneath the sheets that artfully cover up the bits of him that probably are also unclothed. It’s such a trash poster. I got it from ExcelsiCon last year on the down-low and smuggled it out of the convention so strangers wouldn’t know my shame.

  And now I see the real-life version of him almost every. Sin
gle. Day.

  Every morning, his sharp cerulean eyes remind me how much smut I’ve read online and how much smut I probably should not have read online. I have so much PWP bookmarked on my secret fanfic account that if anyone ever found it they would try to exorcise the demons that are most definitely in me.

  And now I can’t even read any of them because instead of Sond? I see Vance. Instead of my sweet, wonderful Ambrose, all I hear is Vance’s soft, subtle English accent as he reads to me my mother’s favorite novel.

  My phone goes off a moment later—a text. I reach over to my nightstand. It’s the group chat with Quinn and Annie.

  QUINN (6:45 AM)

  —RISE AND SHIIINNNNEEE~

  —IT’S COFFEE TIME!

  ANNIE (6:45 AM)

  —ugh

  ROSIE (6:46 AM)

  —morning lovers!

  —* LOSERS

  —** I MEANT LOSERS

  ANNIE (6:46 AM)

  —also lovers.

  —I will take no alternative.

  QUINN (6:47 AM)

  —That’s McLovin to you.

  Sunlight creeps in through the lace curtains, and I groan and roll onto my back. And Sond stares at me from my wall, smirking at me like he knows my secret.

  “Starflame.” I groan, shoving my pillow into my face so I don’t have to look at that smug, beautiful face. “I am so, so boned.”

  * * *

  —

  QUINN AND ANNIE ARE WAITING at the edge of the cul-de-sac when I swerve around to pick them up. They hop in, greeting me with, “Hey, lover.”

  “Hi, McLovin,” I sigh in reply. We have ten minutes to get to school and said school is, oh, fifteen minutes away, so we say our morning pleasantries on the road.

  Annie begins to rage about the Homecoming game coming up as I pick up her coffee from the middle console and hand it to her. “Thank you—I mean can you believe my brother? He’s so stupid. Like, he knows he’s no match for the quarterback of this Friday’s Homecoming game, and yet he just bet fifty bucks on himself! That he’ll win!”

  Quinn nods regally. “I hear the quarterback for this week’s team is massive,” they say.

  “He’s only a junior! He’s the youngest first-string quarterback in that school’s history. His name is Milo something-or-another. Ugh, if only Redfair High didn’t have that doping scandal last year, we could actually play a local rival team. Instead, we’re paired with some team from Asheville and we’re gonna get pulverized.” Annie sighs and sips her iced latte. “No, correction: my brother is going to get pulverized.”

  I frown. “Aren’t we supposed to play easy teams so we can win Homecoming games?”

  “You’d think,” Quinn replies with a shrug. “I can’t spare the brainpower to worry about that. Garrett is still in the lead for Homecoming Overlord, and I’ve run out of ideas…”

  And if Garrett wins Homecoming, then it’ll just make my life even worse, because I am not going to the dance with him with or without the title. But if I don’t, everyone will think I’m some kind of stuck-up snob. Is it too much to ask to go back to the days of when I was absolutely invisible?

  In all honesty, I wouldn’t mind going to the Homecoming dance if I had someone—besides Garrett—to go with. Vance flashes in my head, and I wonder for a moment what he would look like in the Federation’s perfect shade of blue—

  “Red light!” Quinn cries, and I slam on the brakes as the light changes.

  “Sorry,” I mutter.

  Annie, in the passenger seat, slowly releases her death hold on the oh-shit handle. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I just have a lot on my mind.”

  “Oh?” my friends ask.

  The light turns green and I turn left onto the main drag that leads to the high school. “Well, Dad caught the apartment on fire and…I spent the weekend with Vance.” I try to make it sound nonchalant, because it’s not like anything happened. I just stayed in a house with a lot of rooms with my father and one of the most-hated guys on the internet. No biggie.

  Just a normal weekend, right?

  “WHAT?” they both cry.

  “Dish,” Annie orders.

  “You can’t hold out on us,” Quinn adds.

  So as I turn in to the school, I tell them what happened. All of it. All of the boring bits—staying at his house, him asking me to read to him, the Saturday morning my dad and I taught Mr. Rodriguez how to make chocolate murder pancakes, the quiet afternoons when Vance would find me in the library while Dad was at the apartment overseeing the maintenance work and ask if he could join, the silence that settled between us that was warm and comforting, the night he took me home and I saw him—the real him, the him I remembered since the night of the ExcelsiCon Ball.

  There you are, I had said.

  I don’t tell them that part. Partly because it’s private, and partly because I don’t know what I meant. Did I mean that he finally had that curious look in his eyes that he had the night we first met, that half-cocked smile resting on the edge of his lips, the comfort between us where there may have been masks, but there were no secrets.

  There you are, I had said, but what I meant was, I found you, finally.

  When I finish the story, we’re way late to class, but Quinn and Annie haven’t budged from my car, and the parking lot attendant is making a beeline for us in his off-white golf cart.

  My friends exchange a look—the same look—as if they’re in agreement.

  “You’ve got it bad.” Annie breaks the news to me.

  A blush creeps across my face. “What? No, of course not. Why would I?—”

  Quinn puts a hand on my shoulder. “You’ve got it really bad.”

  My shoulders droop. “Oh balls. I do, don’t I?”

  They nod severely. “And we need to get to class before we get written up again. I can’t go to Homecoming if I have after-school detention. Do you have the emergency bagel?”

  “It’s a day old.” Annie nervously takes it out of her bookbag, but I grab it anyway.

  A moment later, the parking lot attendant parks his golf cart beside my car, gets out, and knocks on the window. He’s stone-faced and regal, his graying hair gelled back and his shirt pressed beneath his too-loose football jacket.

  “Miss Thorne,” he greets me as I slowly roll down the window. “You’re a little late.”

  I give him an innocent smile and present him with the day-old breakfast bagel. “Umm, hungry?”

  He shakes his head.

  Ruh-roh.

  “Break for it!” Annie roars, shoving open the passenger-side door. I quickly grab my bookbag, phone, and science notebook, which were strewn on the floorboard, and go scurrying over the middle console and out of the passenger door with her. Quinn vaults out of the back seat, and we haul ass across the parking lot before the attendant can get back into his golf cart and come after us. We don’t slow down until we’re through the breezeway and into the school.

  I lead the charge, and turn the corner into C Hall when—

  I collide with a brick wall.

  Quinn and Annie catch me before I bite the dust, but the contents of my arms go everywhere. My science notebook, with all of its loose pages, poofs into the air.

  “Watch where you’re—Rosie!” Garrett calls my name, surprised to see me.

  The worst person I could run into right now.

  “Sorry, Garrett, can’t stay and chat,” I reply, gathering up my science notes with the help of Annie and Quinn, and I hurry by him before he can stop me. I’m not all that worried about the parking lot attendant writing me up for being late, but Mrs. Angora in homeroom?

  She has a penchant for making tardy students suffer.

  Luckily, she’s lenient today and lets Annie and me sneak in about five minutes late, before the morning news b
egins. Quinn’s homeroom is one class down, but their teacher doesn’t care how late they are, which is lucky. We can’t afford to have Quinn ejected from the running this late in the game. The morning announcements ramble off the student festivities for Homecoming week—spirit days, the colors we’re supposed to wear to the game on Friday, the ticket price for the dance on Saturday, and worst of all, the people leading Homecoming King and Queen.

  “For Homecoming Queen, it’s a tight race between Myrella Johnson and Ava Singh, but as for Homecoming King, Garrett Taylor is winning by at least thirty votes. You can vote every day during lunch in the cafeteria, and don’t forget to dress in school colors this week. Go Wildcats!” the news anchor says, signing off.

  Great. Of course Garrett is officially winning.

  It isn’t until halfway through second period that I realize I don’t have my phone. I must’ve left it in the car, though I could swear I grabbed it. I was in a hurry, though. Ugh, great. Today is already shaping up to be one hell of a terrible Monday, because after second period I find out why Garrett was out of class this morning, too.

  He was hanging up a poster for Homecoming in the common room of the high school. A ten-foot-tall poster that says VOTE GARRETT TAYLOR AS YOUR KING! It towers over the entire student body every time class changes. You can’t miss it, and I certainly don’t.

  My doom now looms over me as the bell rings every hour.

  * * *

  —

  AS LUNCH WRAPS up, I steel my courage and walk up to the table selling Homecoming dance tickets. They’re beginning to pack up, locking the money box, when they see me standing at the other side of the table.

  “Oh, sorry,” Savannah, the school president, replies. “Rosie, right? Did you want one?”

  “Two, actually.”