No One Needs to Know

by Amanda Grace

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  I glance up. “Uh, for what?”

  “For ditching you. For breaking tradition. I felt kind of bad once I was at the casino.”

  “Why, did you lose all your money and have a miserable time?”

  Liam pulls out a stool and sits, leaning forward and resting his elbows on the counter. “No. It was fun. It just wasn’t … it wasn’t quite right without you.”

  “Oh.” Some little part of my heart heals, hearing that. Like maybe he’s not totally over hanging out with me, even if I am his tag-a-long sister.

  I rip off the wrapping paper and find a little white box. When I slide off the lid, a silver bracelet stares back at me. It’s a chain of little starfish. I know without asking that he bought it in the casino gift shop; he didn’t go out of his way for me, but it doesn’t matter. He thought about me. “It’s pretty,” I say.

  “You think?”

  I look up at him, realizing he’s perched on the edge of the stool waiting for my response. I guess he does actually feel bad.

  I sigh. “Yeah. Thank you. And I guess I can forgive you.”

  “Really?”

  “But you still owe me one,” I say.

  “Why don’t we go to the cabin next weekend, then? We could leave right after school on Friday and do two nights there, like you wanted.”

  “Really?” I say.

  “Yeah. Let’s do it. It’s a week late, but it’ll still be fun. We can’t break our tradition.”

  I smile, relief barreling through me. “Okay. I’m in.”

  Zoey

  I take the elevator up to Olivia’s condo, straightening my shirt and grimacing when I see a little grease stain. I’m just raising my fist to the front door when it swings open.

  “Oh, uh, hi,” I say, staring right at Liam. He’s not the one who buzzed me in—Olivia is. It didn’t even occur to me that he’d be home.

  “This is a pleasant surprise,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “Actually,” I say, suddenly feeling awkward, “Olivia and I have a project together. I came here to work on it.”

  “Oh.” Liam’s voice falls.

  “Why do you sound so bummed?” I say, poking him in the stomach. “Your other date cancel on you?”

  He steps back and motions me into the house. “I haven’t gone out with anyone else since we met at the gas station.”

  I blink. When he’d casually called me his girlfriend last week, I thought it was just part of his flirty nature. Like I was “his girl” but not his exclusive girl.

  “You’re kidding, right?” I step into the entry, kicking off my worn-out sneakers.

  “Nah. You’re basically cooler than everyone else, so there’s no point.”

  I swallow and ignore the tightening in my chest, unsure of whether I’m pleased or panicked. Both. Definitely both. Liam is actually choosing me. Surreal. Freshman-year Zoey would have totally peed her pants in excitement over something like this.

  I stand in the entryway, not sure if it would be weird to just walk away from him right now after a proclamation like that.

  Before I can decide what to say, Liam speaks again. “Uh, so do you want to come with us to our lake house this weekend?”

  I raise a brow. “You guys have a lake house? Why, is the Puget Sound condo not enough?”

  He stops in front of me, running his hands up and down my arms and staring into my eyes. “No, this is home. The lake house is more like a cabin. We go every year in the fall, and I’m hereby inviting you.”

  “Oh. Just us?”

  He shrugs. “I got my fill of my friends last weekend, but Olivia will probably invite someone.”

  “Oh,” I say, my voice falling. A whole weekend with Liam and Olivia I could handle, but not if Ava is there too. “I don’t know—”

  “You won’t have to hang out with Olivia and her friends. I don’t. The cabin has two levels. They usually stay downstairs.”

  The way he’s facing me, his hands squeezing my arms, is intense.

  I swallow. “Um, maybe. I’ll think about it, okay?”

  “Please? You’re the only one I’m asking.” He pauses, studying me. “And the only one I really want to go.”

  My heart spasms. I can’t say no to him when he’s looking at me like that and being so serious, so heartfelt, for the first time in … well, probably ever. I hardly know this version of Liam. “Oh. Yeah, okay. I’ll go.”

  “Awesome. I can’t wait.” He wraps his arms around me, picking me up and spinning me around before setting me down again and brushing his lips against mine. His fingers graze my chin as he tips my head back, and I close my eyes, enjoying the kiss.

  “Me neither,” I say when he pulls away. I’m not quite sure when this happened, when we became two people who can casually kiss in the entryway of his condo in the middle of the day. That same panic and pleasure spins through me. I’m not sure what to make of the idea of something … real with Liam.

  I thought we were just having fun. Now it’s going to be something?

  “Hey, Zoey,” Olivia’s voice calls. I turn to see her standing in the hall. I don’t miss the way her gaze flits over the spots where Liam and I are touching. The way his hand is on my lower back, pulling me toward him, making me sort of arch my back. I feel like I just got caught by my mom or something. It’s … awkward.

  “Hey,” I reply, pulling away from him.

  “So, ready to work?”

  I nod, parting ways with Liam and following her into her dad’s office.

  “You can use the desktop if you want,” she says, plunking down on a little fainting couch or chaise or whatever they’re called. She turns so that she’s leaning against the backrest, facing the desk. She crosses her legs at the ankles and rests the computer on her lap.

  “Okay, yeah.” I go to the leather desk chair, turning it around so that I can sit. I feel like the president or something behind such a stately desk, in a chair with big arm rests and a tall back.

  I wiggle the mouse and the computer comes to life. My word document is already open on the screen.

  “I pulled it off my email for you,” Olivia explains. “And I added my latest scene. I still need to finish it, so don’t like, get all nitpicky or anything, but it should give you an idea what I’m thinking.”

  “Oh. Thanks.” I scroll to the bottom, to where my last section ends and hers begins. Her character’s name is Priscilla, and it doesn’t take long to fall into her point of view.

  Priscilla stood behind the window in the second-floor office, looking out across the massive expanse of the warehouse. This was the view her father loved. This was where he always stood, his chest puffed out as if he were the ruler of a kingdom he’d built, brick by brick.

  But Priscilla knew that it was not his sweat that built the warehouse. It was not his callused, bloody hands that put this place together, piece by piece.

  It was his money.

  Below, the machines hummed, a never-ending racket barely muffled by the glass and the walls. On the floor, she knew, the machinery was even louder.

  Deafening.

  She watched as a girl—someone close to her own sixteen years of age—scurried across the floor, dodging and spinning around the other workers in her haste to carry whatever was in a large crate to its intended destination. There was a beautiful grace to the way she moved, even with her shoulders hunched, her arms laden down with heavy materials.

  Almost as if she could feel Priscilla’s gaze, the girl looked up.

  And they locked eyes.

  Moments later, the shift whistle screeched. It made Priscilla jump and break eye contact with the girl. When she blinked and looked again, the girl was gone.

  “This is good,” I say. “It’s the moment our characters meet.”

  “Ob
viously,” Olivia says, laughing.

  “I mean, we’ve done all this lead-up to it. The morning routines and the housing and the family, and then we finally get to the warehouse and it’s an important moment. You wrote it well.”

  “So, I was thinking,” Olivia says, sitting up. “My character would keep thinking about your character. Long after they part ways. She’s seen something in her eyes, and it’s going to haunt her until they can meet again.”

  There’s something … intense about the look Olivia is giving me, like she’s trying to convey some hidden subtext.

  Okay,” I say, swallowing.

  “So I thought maybe what you would write is what your character thinks of my character after they each go their own way, you know? Since this moment was from my character’s point of view. You can show that these girls have a really deep connection. Something other people might not, you know, understand, since they seem so different.”

  It’s suddenly hard to breathe. I nod and stare at the monitor to avoid looking at Olivia. “Sure. Yeah, I can do that.”

  “So what will you write?”

  I pick up a pen from the cup next to the monitor, mostly to give me something to do with my hands, and then reach for a yellow notepad. “Uh,” I say. I was thinking, maybe … ” My voice trails off. “She’s jealous.”

  “She is?”

  “She sees your character up there in the window, out of the dust and the sounds—protected, I guess—and she wishes she were her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she assumes your character has it easy. That your character will never know the hurt and the heartache and the hard life.”

  The room falls silent and I force my eyes to remain on the notebook.

  “What’s going on with you and my brother?” Olivia says.

  I jerk my head up and look over at her. “Change of subject, much?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “I’ve told you before,” I say, staring at the notepad again. What’s with her sudden fascination with my relationship with Liam? “I’m more of a happy-for-now kind of girl. We’re having fun. He’s a cool guy.”

  “He doesn’t usually ‘have fun’ with the same girl for more than a week or two. And he didn’t object when I referred to you as his girlfriend.”

  I glance over at her. “Then it’s him you should be questioning.”

  She stares at me dead-on, chewing on her bottom lip. “Are you? His girlfriend? I mean, are you really into him like that?”

  I raise a brow. “Last I checked, neither of us was writing our wedding vows, so … ”

  Olivia leans back and pulls her feet up onto the chaise. “Whatever. I was just curious, is all. You two looked pretty cozy in the hall earlier.”

  I make a non-committal humming sound.

  “Anyway. So for my next scene, I was thinking … ”

  But as I listen to her drone on and on about her plans for the rest of her scene, I can’t get her questions out of my head.

  Why does she care that I’m with Liam?

  Olivia

  I’m pretty much folded in half in the back seat, staring at the place where Liam’s hand rests on Zoey’s knee and trying to decide why it is that it looks so …

  Wrong.

  It’s a very couple-y thing to do. That’s what’s wrong with it. Liam isn’t supposed to connect with the same girl long enough to become a real couple with her. He’s supposed to get infatuated for three point five seconds, move on, and hang out with me again.

  When Liam pulls off the county two-lane highway onto the bumpy, curving, narrow road leading to our cabin, Zoey sits up straighter, staring out the window. “This isn’t what I was picturing,” she says. “I mean, I know you said it was a cabin, but … ”

  Liam flashes her a grin. “You thought it would be like our condo, huh?”

  She nods, taking in the tiny roofs half-covered in pine needles and the flashes of the small, quiet lake between the trees.

  “Our mom’s family owned it before she met my dad,” I say, relaxing against the seat.

  “Dad’s the side with money,” Liam adds. “My grandpa—my mom’s dad—bought this place decades ago, when it was basically a shell, and rebuilt it with his own hands.”

  “Oh.”

  Zoey glances back at me, her smile wide and brilliant, and then suddenly I get it.

  She’s happy we’re taking her to an old family cabin, something more in her comfort zone than our pricey condo.

  Liam slows next to a sign that says Remein, and then coasts down an angled driveway, pulling to a stop next to a small wooden cabin with a green roof.

  “So,” I say, sitting up and unfastening my seat belt, “I’m guessing Liam didn’t inform you of the lack of plumbing?”

  She flicks a glance back at me, clearly expecting to see that I’m joking. “Um, no.”

  “There’s an outhouse,” Liam interjects. “And we’ve got one of those big bottled water dispenser things for drinking.”

  “Oh.” Yeah, definitely not what Zoey had expected, based on the way she looks like she’s trying not to cringe. “Does it at least have electricity?”

  I snicker. “Yes. We didn’t go back in time or anything. But my mom refuses to let my dad upgrade this place. She said she grew up out here, every summer. She wants it to feel like it always did.”

  “That’s kind of nice,” Zoey says, unbuckling. “Sentimental, you know?”

  “Come on in. It’s not as bad as it sounds,” I say.

  We climb out and go around to the back of the car, grabbing our backpacks as Liam lifts the cooler from the trunk. He uses a key on his ring to open the back door, and then it swings inward with a loud creak. “Welcome to your humble abode for the weekend.”

  “Lay off the cheese,” I say, pushing past him.

  “Don’t mind my snarly sister,” I hear him say to Zoey. “She’s just bummed she has to sleep downstairs alone. But it’s not my fault her friends are so lame.”

  I flip him off over my shoulder, then head out the back door to take the outdoor steps to the basement, where I’ll be staying this weekend. I shove the slider open, then walk into the basement and toss my bag onto one of the twin beds.

  There are four beds in here, actually, which makes it painfully obvious I’m alone. Ava made some half-hearted promise about how maybe she could come out on Sunday, after some big gala she’s going to with her parents is over, but I know it was an empty promise.

  She’s not coming.

  While my brother bunks with Zoey. They’ll be in the bedroom right over my own.

  God, I’d wanted to badly to come here for our birthday, but now that we’re here, I just want to go home again. I don’t know if I can sit around all weekend watching Liam be lovey-dovey and happy with her while I’m just … down here. Alone. Staring at the walls, or the lake, or whatever.

  I scowl, reaching for the little pocket at the front of my bag, where I find my little purple box.

  I swallow a Xanax, washing it down with a swig of water.

  Maybe once it kicks in, I won’t care that this weekend is going to suck.

  Zoey

  I’m standing in the middle of a narrow, galley-style kitchen; the sink has no faucet. I wonder how it is that this cabin turned out to be nothing like I’d imagined.

  “For washing dishes,” Liam says, gesturing to the sink. “Using the bottled water, of course. Don’t go too crazy dumping pop or anything like that into the sink—it just drains into a pipe that leads outside.”

  I nod, following him deeper into the cabin and then realizing that there isn’t much farther to go.

  A small living room to the left, a kitchen table on the right, and a big window up ahead.

  I walk to it, peering out at the prettiest, most pristine lake I’ve ever seen. The surface is like
glass. Across the way, other small cabins nestle amongst the trees. Below, a small shed sits near the edge of the water and a dock stretches out, a little rowboat tied up to the end.

  “It’s pretty,” I say, staring out the window and feeling the tightness in my chest unwind. This is a place I can relax. A place where I can enjoy the weekend. Suddenly, as the next forty-eight hours stretch out in front of me, I’m happy Liam convinced me to come.

  “Yeah. I think so. Come on, you can put your backpack in the bedroom.” He tugs my hand and I follow him away from the window, through the doorway at the edge of the living room. A small room is tucked away, a king-sized bed taking up most of the space.

  Until this moment, I hadn’t actually thought about where I would sleep—or that he’d expect me to sleep with him. That fact is apparent as we set our bags down next to each other.

  Liam has been … amazing so far. But I just met him two weeks ago. All we’ve done is kiss a couple of times. Now I don’t know what to think, what he expects, and the peace

  I felt as I stared out the window melds into knots of worry.

  It’s not that I expect him to force the issue or anything.

  “Where’s Olivia sleeping?” I ask.

  “Downstairs. There’s a basement. You can’t access it from inside; you have to go through the slider outside.”

  “Oh.” So we’re really going to be alone. In a bed. To-gether. Right.

  He takes off his fancy silver watch, setting it down on the table beside the bed. I wonder if he did that because time doesn’t really matter, here. “Anyway, do you want to take the rowboat out?”

  “Like to go fishing?”

  “Nah. I mean, we could fish if you want to, but I don’t really have the patience.” He grins. “I’d just like to row around the lake for a bit.”

  “Oh. Sure. Yeah, that sounds fun.”

  “Cool. I’ll get the oars and life jackets, if you want to go tell Olivia. She can come, if she feels like it.”

  “Sure.”

  I leave the little bedroom behind and find my way to a door that leads onto the deck at the back of the cabin. The view is even better out here, totally unobstructed. The railing is white iron around the edges, but in the middle, it’s just huge plates of glass. I breathe deeply, raking in the scent of pine and fresh air.