I have to apologize. That’s all there is to it. And as quickly as possible, too. I can’t let this go on the way I did with Kara and Meg, and worry for days about the things we said or should have said. I can’t do that with Suze; it’ll drive me to madness.
I tighten the belt on the robe and play out the scenario in my head. I’ll go get dressed, find Suze, apologize, try to explain if she’ll hear me out, and of course, beg forgiveness. Then maybe I can find Will and do the same, if they’re not together, talking about what a horrible person I am and questioning how they could have ever accepted me as a friend.
I push open the wooden door of the showers and I’m hit with a different kind of water. It is pouring. The storm that had threatened all day, looming over me like my guilt and regret, finally broke. Clutching my shower caddy, I do what any reasonable girl would do: I take off toward my tent at a dead sprint, awkwardly running through the mud in my flip-flops, squealing like an idiot.
But the rain is coming down so hard that it’s made my shower practically useless. The bathrobe is weighing me down, and I’m soaked and miserable and defeated after only a few paces. With no thought in my head but getting to shelter, I run toward the closest tent I know, the only one I can think to go to right now: Christian’s.
He’s alone, luckily. I couldn’t have dealt with more commentary about my bathrobe from Grant. I pull back the tent flaps and let them fall behind me as I enter. He’s got his back turned to me, and what a great back it is.
“Hey,” he says, his deep voice sultry. “Wondered what was taking you so long.”
“I didn’t know you were expecting me,” I say, and he turns at the sound of my voice. The surprise on his face melts into a slow, sexy smile. “Waiting on someone?”
“Not anymore,” he says. “I guess the rain is leaving people stranded. I love the rain.”
Flattered, I feel myself blush. I reach up and smooth down my hair, only to realize how soaked it is and how drowned rat–like I must look. “I was showering. I guess that was pointless.”
“I could tell from the robe,” he says, making a little motion with his hand toward my sole piece of clothing. “I suppose some would call this an improvement over the towel.”
“Not you?”
He chuckles, dark and wicked. “Not me.”
I flush again and then curse myself for being such a little girl about it. “Mind if I wait out the storm, then?”
“Not at all.” He sits on his air mattress and pats the space beside him, and I take my cue, trying to sit as gracefully as I can in the soaked robe.
He’s not in his knightly attire today. He’s just wearing jeans and a white shirt, and yet, he still looks like a prince. The jeans are perfect on him, definitely designer, probably better than even the kind Kyle liked to wear, and they look, somehow, like they’ve been tailored to his body. His hair has a bit of a wave in it today, probably from all the humidity, and it curls around his ears like a Greek sculpture.
How one person can look that good has to be some sort of weird anomaly in the universe. I’m sure somewhere there are several truly ugly people walking around so that nature can balance out all the attractiveness Christian got.
And here I am, next to him. Wearing a bathrobe that’s not even mine, hair wet and stringy, and no makeup at all.
“I thought maybe you were mad at me,” I tell him. “I haven’t seen you around much this week.”
“Why would I be mad at you?” he asks, amused, and I wonder then why I thought he was. Maybe I’m so used to feeling like people are mad at me, it’s just my default setting now. Or maybe I’ve been so upset that he hasn’t asked me to the Revel that I was taking it the wrong way. Or maybe my confusion over Will has just made me feel guilty.
“Just being paranoid, I guess,” I admit. “But Sage says you’ve been dealing with family stuff.”
“Sage,” Christian mumbles, then snorts, shaking his head. “Well, here I am, and we’re finally alone, and it’s storming so everyone’s stuck where they are. So we should probably take advantage.”
“How should we take advantage, do you suppose?” I say, trying to be coy.
“I have a few ideas . . .”
Christian leans close and touches his lips to mine. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I know that his arms are moving around me, ensnaring me and drawing me closer to him, that I’m pressed up against him, my bare legs vulnerable to the brush of his designer jeans, that his soft mouth is gently working mine open, more insistent and with more purpose than I ever remember Kyle having. But I can’t really grasp all that. Not beyond the basic level, because all I can think is finally.
Finally, Christian is kissing me. Christian the knight. Prince Charming. Finally.
And it’s so worth the wait. He’s good at this. Skilled, even if he is a little impatient. His lips slide against mine, sensuous and firm, and when I feel his tongue touch my own, I hum at the thrill of it, and his voice joins mine.
Christian shifts, and I find myself being eased down onto his air mattress. It’s so fast, so practiced, that it makes me dizzy, and a rush not unlike a shot of adrenaline shoots through me. It’s not quite the feeling I’d hoped for—not the tingling of pleasure but the prickling of alarm instead.
No, wait. There is a tingling, but it’s coming from my lips. It’s like I’ve just been to the dentist and the numbing shot is wearing off.
Christian presses his mouth against mine harder and the tingling gets worse, and now I taste it, too. Minty. Like toothpaste or mints or . . .
Lip balm.
Tingly, expensive lip balm from the mall.
It takes more effort than it should to push Christian away because he’s gotten so handsy in the last ten seconds, and I’m relieved when he’s not touching me anymore.
“Have you been kissing Cassie?” I ask, wiping at my mouth.
“What? No. You really are paranoid, aren’t you? Crazy, even.”
I am utterly astounded. “Are you really trying to turn this around on me? You’re wearing her lip balm.”
Christian moves away from me, shaking his head like I’m the unreasonable one. “Yes, I was kissing Cassie. So what?”
“When?”
Christian bites at his thumbnail. “She was here before you.”
His words as I entered the tent hit me like a sack of fertilizer: Wondered what was taking you so long.
“You were waiting on her when I came in, weren’t you?” Christian doesn’t deny it, but bites down hard on his thumbnail. “I can’t believe it. Her and then me? All on the same day?”
Christian takes my disgust in stride. “Come on, Ro. It’s not like you’re my girlfriend or something.”
“No, that’s Cassie, right?” I snap, and Christian emits a laugh that’s half nervous, half surprised.
“No, she’s not my girlfriend either.”
I stare at him, all the hurt and confusion swirling around in my head making it hard to comprehend what he’s saying. Then it all clicks into place in one loud, resounding crack. The phone calls he just had to take, disappearing in the evenings, the same old tired story of “family stuff”—it can only mean one thing:
“You have a girlfriend, too, don’t you? That’s why you were always going off to answer your phone.” I dig my fingers into my brow bones, trying to ward off the inevitable headache. “And you’re cheating on her with Cassie. And me.”
Christian looks rather smug when he says, “Well, not you until today. Technically.”
I stand, my head touching the canvas roof of the tent. “And you’re proud of that, aren’t you?”
He doesn’t answer but he doesn’t have to. The expression on his face says it all.
“You’ve been lying to me this whole time.” I say it more to myself than him, as if I have to say it out loud to understand it, and maybe accept it as well.
“I haven’t been lying.” I stare at him, and he merely shrugs. “So I didn’t tell you about Cassie, and I didn’t tell you I h
ad a girlfriend. So what? You said yourself you just wanted to have fun.”
My words from the bonfire three weeks ago come back to bite me right in the butt. I offer up a weak argument. “There’s a difference between having a casual thing and messing around with two girls behind your girlfriend’s back.”
I can’t believe it. Christian rolls his eyes at me. Like, legitimately rolls them, as if I’m the pesky little kid saying stupid stuff whom he can’t get rid of. “You were the one who started this. You came on to me. You said you wanted to have some fun and you’ve been following me around—”
“I have not!”
Christian barely acknowledges that I’ve spoken. “You follow me to the stables, you sit by me when I play guitar, you come to the jousts, and now, here you are. In my tent. In only a bathrobe, I might add. Come on, Ro. I’m not an idiot. I know what you’re after. This isn’t the first time a girl’s shown up at my tent half naked.”
Well, if I’d had any doubt as to what state of dress Cassie was in earlier, it’s gone now.
“But you flirted back,” I protest, unwilling to let him convince me this is all my fault. “You acted like you wanted me.”
“And that wasn’t a lie,” Christian says, and he says it in a way that could almost be sexy, if every syllable didn’t make me feel like a low-life home wrecker.
And that’s really what I am, because Christian hasn’t said anything untrue. I did come on to him first. I did follow him around. I did pursue this. I did make it clear to him that I wasn’t looking for something serious. Sure, I didn’t know that he had a girlfriend, but that doesn’t matter. In the end, I’m the “other woman” in this situation. I’m the Lacey.
Oh no. I’m the Lacey.
That realization on top of everything else makes tears come, unbidden and unstoppable. I wipe at my face but it’s no use, Christian’s seen them.
“Hey,” he says. His voice is gentle and he drapes an arm across my shoulders. To anyone else this might seem soothing, but now I see right through it. It’s fake, just a lie like everything else, and goodness knows his idea of “comforting” isn’t what I need right now. “Don’t get so worked up. It’s just what everyone does out here, you know?”
“What everyone does?” I ask dumbly.
“Yeah. I know you’re new, but I kind of already thought you got it, with you hooking up with Fuller and all. It’s all just summer stuff. No feelings.” Christian pulls back, looking at me meaningfully. “Fun stuff, like you said.”
Fairemances. Suze warned me. Only this wasn’t quite what I had in mind. There are two types of summer flings, I guess. A fling who doesn’t care and a fling who cares, and I guess I wanted one who cared.
And I thought Christian did. At least a little bit. He sent me the troubadours, after all.
“But . . . ,” I say to him. “If you don’t have feelings for me, then how come you sent me the troubadours that day I was so upset because my ex was here?”
“I never sent you any troubadours.” Christian squints. “That is a great idea, though. Should have thought of it.”
“But if you didn’t send them, who . . .” I don’t have to finish the question because I know the answer now.
Will.
Will was the only one I told about Kyle, except for Suze. And Suze wouldn’t have sent me troubadours. That’s not something friends do for each other. That’s something boyfriends do.
Or boys who want to be boyfriends.
I look at Christian. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but he’s nowhere near as beautiful now. He looks perfect still, maybe, but in a cold way. Aloof and uncaring. Not at all like Will, who always has a smile for me, except for today, when I insulted his whole existence.
“I didn’t hook up with Will,” I explain, though I have no idea why I even care what this cheater thinks of me. “But maybe I should have.”
I walk out of the tent. Christian calls after me, but I can’t hear what he’s saying because of the rain. Even though it is coming down harder than ever, I walk slowly back to my tent, too dazed to go fast.
My tent is vacant, and although I hate that Suze is avoiding me, I’m grateful there’s no one there. I sink down onto my mattress, my thoughts as muddy as my feet, and let myself cry.
16
WEEK 3—TUESDAY
I’m in birthday party hell.
Little girl after little girl sits in my chair, all of them requesting butterflies or fairies or unicorns, all of them chattering about ice cream and knights and dragons.
A party of eight-year-old girls celebrating a birthday and talking constantly in their squeaky voices is irritating, but it beats the hell out of the cold stares Cassie’s been giving me. I’m sure she and Christian had a good laugh at my expense last night, and they’ve been having good laughs since. When the birthday party moves on to the petting zoo, I almost beg to come with them just so I can get away, but I’ve got a job to do. So I spend what’s left of the day in uncomfortable silence with Cassie, and run out the door as soon as the bell in the tower chimes.
Unfortunately, the bell tower chime also signals that the last joust is soon, which means that in half an hour Sage will be expecting me for our riding lesson. There is absolutely no chance I can risk running into Christian in the stables, and there’s no point in going riding today anyway. I’m too much of a mess. Even Jiffy’s steady trot and the stillness of the forest won’t help me now—in fact, all that quiet time is just the thing I need to avoid.
And since Suze still isn’t talking to me, and I have to assume Will isn’t either, all I’ve got is quiet time.
Impulse and desperation lead me to the kitchen behind the tavern, where I make myself useful peeling potatoes and rolling sporks and Wet-nap packets inside paper napkins. Ramón’s disposition is equal to my own, and he doesn’t question my motives when I hang around long after the joust is over. The boys in the kitchen try to remain classy for a few minutes, unused to a female presence, but it all goes to hell in a hand-basket when one of them drops a whole tray of baked potatoes on the floor and they proceed to cuss one another out over who, exactly, is at fault. Somehow it makes me laugh, in spite of everything, and they relax around me and tease one another about their recent screwups, in the kitchen or otherwise.
A knock at the back door quiets their trash talking, and Ramón opens the door to reveal Sage. She looks past him to me, saying, “Hey, what’s the big idea?”
I hop down off my stool by the sink and head outside, taking care to close the door behind me so the kitchen workers won’t hear.
“Sorry. I just couldn’t face the stables today.”
“Why?”
I shrink slightly under Sage’s interrogation.
“I found out about Christian. He has a girlfriend.”
“So?”
“So . . .” I look at Sage. We’re truly different people. This kind of thing would have just rolled off her back. Or maybe she would have challenged Christian to a sword fight and bullied him into submission. I don’t know. All I know is that she won’t really get this. “So he was lying to me. Flirting with me and trying to kiss me and all this time he had a girlfriend.”
Sage kicks at the ground. “I know. He’s a liar. Not your fault, though. So let’s go riding.”
“I really don’t want to see him,” I say again, as if the simple act of repeating it might make it sink into her thick head. Then what she said sinks into mine. “Wait. You knew?”
“Well, yeah,” Sage says. “A guy like that? Yeah. Guys like Christian always have somebody.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask, and my voice rises up a few notches. “Were you covering for him? All that crap about family stuff?”
Sage has the decency to turn red and look generally uncomfortable. “I mean, I didn’t exactly lie. I didn’t know for sure, but I’d heard him talking to someone on the phone. But he said it was family stuff so . . .”
“That’s your story and you’re sticking to it?”
Sage makes a face. “It’s the knight’s code, dude. Sorry. I’m not going to rat out one of my brothers. It doesn’t work that way.”
“What a load of bull.”
Sage’s nostrils flare. “Hey, we have to be able to trust one another. If we can’t trust one another off the field, someone’s going to get hurt on the field. Know what I mean? It’s faire loyalties and stuff.”
“Faire loyalties,” I scoff. “You know what I think? I think a lot of people use the faire as an excuse to act like assholes. I just didn’t think you were one of them.”
I whirl around, marching back into the kitchen, making sure to slam the screen door loud enough that Sage will hear it as she walks away. It’s also loud enough to make everyone in the kitchen stop peeling potatoes or stirring sauces to stare at me. Their questioning eyes only make me feel worse, and tears cause my vision to go hazy.
Ramón’s gruff voice saves me. “I think the steins need to be washed, and the dish towels could use some folding, and there’s a whole floor out there that could use a good mopping.”
When the workers don’t move immediately, Ramón adds, “I wasn’t saying it for my health. Get out of here.”
The workers dash off, exiting from every door around us in a way that would be comical if I was in any mood to laugh.
Ramón sits down on a stool and pats the one next to it, and I take the hint. When he picks up a potato and a knife, I follow his lead. We shave off peels for a moment in silence.
“You and Sage fight?”
Ramón’s voice is as rough as ever, but it’s quieter, and that effort warms me. “Yes. But not just her. Suze and Will, too.”
“It’s been a busy summer for you.”
I chuckle miserably. “It hasn’t been all bad. But yesterday sucked.”
Ramón grunts in understanding, but offers no advice or consolation. I set a fully peeled potato aside and reach out for another one, and that’s when I realize Ramón isn’t peeling the potato—he’s carving it. A shape is emerging from its dirty white flesh, its form rustic and crude from the many scrapes of the small knife, but I recognize it immediately. A bulbous nose, comically large eyes, a droopy smile and a lazy twirl of mustache, the beginnings of a long, pointed hat.
My Faire Lady Page 19
