I shoved my way through the bodies, looking in vain for Tori’s gold locks or Keane’s unruly brown hair. The house had grown darker as the sun has slipped beyond the lake and what few light fixtures were on made most of the partygoers look like they all had dark hair.
Someone grabbed me and then laughed when I turned around. “Wrong person,” they said just as I was knocked to the side from behind me. All this jostling was pissing me off, knowing that Hollis was waiting outside in the cold and I had barely made it five feet through the front door.
It was probably too loud for Keane to hear his ringtone, but I tried calling him anyway. And it was no surprise when it kicked over to the voicemail. I didn’t have Tori’s number, but even if I did I would be surprised if she heard her phone either.
So I kept shoving bodies and after a little bit of time I made it to the kitchen. It, surprisingly, was the least crowded place in what I had seen so far of the house. A few people were drunkenly making sandwiches on the island, but otherwise the rest of the space was empty. Which meant I would have to search upstairs.
If I hadn’t been drinking, I would have seen Hollis home myself, maybe calling my Gram to help me. But the last thing Gram needed was to worry over me drinking, to see her son—my father—reflected all over again. I tried calling Keane again, and when it was still unsuccessful, I braved making my way through the people to the stairs. It was absolutely fucking miserable in the house, and it was unbelievable to me that anyone would want to hang out in this space for more than a few minutes. None of the people crowding the space seemed to in any hurry for the fresh air the backyard offered. They were body to body, some even holding drinks above their heads as they swayed to the obnoxiously loud music.
I loved music. I lived, I breathed, I dreamt music. But this wasn’t simply music. This was a cacophony.
After what felt like a lifetime, I made it to the stairs and gave up being polite, shoving through people—guys mostly—as quickly as I could. I hadn’t seen Keane exit to the outside while Hollis and I had been out there chatting, so I hoped to find him upstairs. And Tori too.
At the landing, the sound was quieter, but still fucking loud enough to obliterate a few eardrums. I opened closed doors and stepped through open doorways, to no avail. It wasn’t until I made it down the hallway, to the last door, that I knocked before opening. And sure enough, Keane was in there. And so was Tori.
“What the fuck, Adam,” Keane said, and I averted my eyes from Tori, who was topless, focusing my attentions on him. He struggled into his pants and glared at me as he tried to zip them over his erection. It wasn’t the most compromising way I had ever found my best friend, but it sure ranked up there.
“I’ve been looking for you,” I said, not wanting to waste a minute.
“You could at least look away,” Tori said as she lazily scooped up her bra from the floor.
Putting my hand to the side of my head, I shielded my eyes from her and looked at Keane, whose eyes said he was ready to murder me. “We need to get Hollis home.”
“Is she okay?” I heard Tori ask from the other side of my hand.
“She was drowned by Ben Stafford’s beer. The fucker was double fisting and fell on her.”
Tori gasped and I heard a flurry of emotion. “Where is she?”
“Out front. But the path to the front door is insanely crowded. I would go out of the kitchen door if you want to get out of here.”
She was out the door before I could follow her and Keane hurriedly tied the laces of one of his shoes, the glare gone from his eyes.
“I thought you were done with the Tori shit. You kept bitching about how she leads you on,” I said, picking up his other shoe from across the room and bringing it back to him.
“She just wants casual,” he said, shoving his foot into the second shoe. “It was my bad thinking she wanted something more.”
“She’s heading far away, Keane. Did you think she’d actually stick around, abandon her college plans?”
Keane glared at me, but it slipped away from his face just as face as it had come on. “I guess I thought maybe I was different for her.”
“If you’re gonna hold onto that ill-conceived hope, you should probably not try to fuck her at random parties.” I clapped him on the back. He’d been hung up on Tori for the last couple years, but I knew she’d only seen him in a friendly sort of way. “There will be girls at school,” I told him. “In a few months, you’ll be saying ‘Tori who?’”
Keane eyed me glumly. “Doubt that. Especially when my wingman is gone.”
“You don’t need a wingman,” I told him, skirting the topic of me leaving.”
He looked down at my chest and then at my face. “You fucking reek, dude.”
“Did you miss the part about Hollis being soaked in beer? I gave her my jacket, but she’s waiting outside for us. So calm your dick and hurry up, okay?”
I left him and started down the stairs when I was stopped by someone with a hand to my chest. I could only see a head of blonde hair, so short she was. She wrapped an arm around my waist, but I had been so focused on getting back to Hollis that I was momentarily dumbfounded as to who this was.
“I’ve been looking for you,” her voice purred.
“Oh yeah?” I asked uneasily as I wracked my brain for who it could be. I pulled her from me and she lifted her chin. I had a straight look down the front of her low-cut and very tight shirt and quickly looked into her face instead.
“Hey, Kate.”
Her smile curled, blood red lips smiling in a way that felt predatory. I tried to ease back from her hold, but she was totally clamped onto me. “Were you looking for me?”
Speaking of leading on, I had my own situation on my hands. But unlike Keane, I was all too ready to shake Kate loose. We’d gone on one date—if you could even call it that. I didn’t. We’d caught a quick bite to eat at her parents’ restaurant after a lacrosse game in the spring and she’d attacked me with her mouth in the car as I drove her home, her hands all over the crotch of my pants like her hands and my dick were meant to be best friends.
Don’t get me wrong; I was an eighteen-year-old guy with a healthy sexual appetite. But Kate hadn’t really done it for me. We’d spent the longest twenty minutes of my life at her family’s restaurant talking about her college plans, with no mention of my plans for post-high school life. She was interested in having a boyfriend as long as that boyfriend didn’t actually have things to say.
“Actually, I’m looking for Hollis … Vinke.” I didn’t know why I included her last name. Everyone knew who Hollis was—she was the only person with her name.
Kate’s nose wrinkled. “I thought you hated that bitch,” she said with an undoubtable pout.
“I … don’t.” Maybe I had, at one time. Maybe I had lumped her in with the rest of them—the people who’d doused her in beer and hadn’t even asked her if she was okay. But I wasn’t going to get into it with Kate here on the stairs. I had wasted enough time just getting up the stairs to find Tori and Keane and I didn’t want to waste another minute standing here, talking to someone who had no interest in me besides the fact that I played the piano. And I only knew she was interested in that, because she’d said how hot it made her only a dozen or so times that night she’d tried to rip my dick from my pants. I was no ace in science classes, but even I knew the chemistry between us just wasn’t there. Or, if it was, it was entirely one-sided. “I gotta go outside,” I said, trying to move around her, but her arm was clamped firmly around my middle.
“You never called me back.” She pouted again and ran her hand over my chin. I worked not to appear completely repulsed by that unwelcome touch, but internally my anger was building. I clearly wanted out of her hold, but her own aggression was keeping me rooted to the spot.
“Look, Kate. You’re great, but I’m just not interested.” I said it quickly, hoping the ripping-off-the band-aid delivery would lessen her hurt.
And it did, for a moment and he
r hand dropped from my face. Her eyes went sad and her pout rivaled any toddler’s. “Your dick sure seemed interested.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “It’s a dick,” I said by way of explanation, though it was a weak one. Had my dick gotten hard as she’d messily groped it? Sure. But had I done anything about it? No. My dick had stayed locked into my pants like it was fucking Fort Knox, and Kate had crossed her arms over her chest and pouted the rest of the way to her house. “I’m sorry, Kate.” I almost said the unbearably cliché, Let’s be friends line before I thought the better of it. I tried to pull away again and her arm came up, turning so she showed me the fresh ink on her forearm. I peered at it with no little bit of interest, because of its distinctive shape.
“Look at this,” she said, and she looked completely miserable as she showed off the rose tattoo just below her elbow. “You like Beauty and the Beast, right?”
I had tunnel vision. She wrote the note? I tried to reconcile that secret little note I’d seen in my locker, the crude but thoughtfully drawn rose doodled on the front. I had thought someone had listened to my speech and had felt some connection to it.
She hadn’t gotten the tattoo to impress me, had she? I never once intimated that I wanted to further get to know her, in a romantic or even a friendly way, but that tattoo made me think she’d assumed a connection that didn’t exist. Fuck.
I replayed Kate’s words in my head, You like Beauty and the Beast, right? It just hadn’t been as simple as liking the movie. My speech hadn’t been on the movie or the story, but the symbolism of its famous wilting rose.
“The note?” I hedged, wanting an answer.
But she didn’t get a chance to answer because my last name boomed from someone’s mouth at the bottom of the stairs, and I turned my attention to it.
“I should kick your ass, band geek,” Ben said, flanked by two of his friends. They looked warily at me before looking at their buddy, clearly not totally Team Ben’s Rage. As far as insults went, band geek was an unoriginal one, but it succeeded in doing what he’d intended. A few people had laughed, and some repeated band geek like an echo.
“Kick my ass? Why? Because you can’t hold your liquor?” Many of the people inside hadn’t witnessed what he’d done to Hollis, which was evident by the laughs and cheers for Ben.
“Why are you even at this party, band geek? A little above you, isn’t it? Did your dad drive you here?” Ben turned to Seth, the host. “Might want to make sure that stop sign is still at the end of your road, Seth. This one’s dad is known for taking them out.” He pointed a thumb back at me.
That got me. I could deal with being called a band geek. I could deal with jokes about me not being one of the rich kids. But talking about my dad was off-limits. The thing was, I knew my dad was a royal fuck up. I was embarrassed of him. But I wouldn’t be like him.
A movement out the corner of my eye had me turning, my gaze colliding with Hollis’s. Judging by the progress she’d made into the room full of people, she had to have been there for at least a few minutes. But it wasn’t her position in the room I was most surprised by. It was her complete lack of emotion.
Ben and Seth were trading stories about my dad—who was infamous in this small town—but Hollis wasn’t saying anything, one way or another. The girl who’d told me she wasn’t like the rest of them was silent. And, what was worse, whatever feeling I had seen in her eyes under the moonlight an hour earlier was gone, replaced by something much worse: indifference.
There wasn’t an ounce of remorse in her eyes as the half-dozen guys taunted me. She remained silent, still wearing my fucking jacket as she observed the scene from the across the room. Doing nothing.
She was the same person I had initially pegged her as. She’d fed me lies I had impatiently gulped down—so eager for a connection that I had believed her lies. I’d wasted my time getting to know her, and I’d felt bad for her for a minute. But I wouldn’t anymore. And I vowed then and there, to never drop my guard around anyone, least of all her.
3
NOW
Hollis
Tori leaned into me, her glass of wine sloshing down her wrist. “David DeBier’s mom is looking at you like you’re a snack.”
I followed her line of vision and wrinkled my nose. “She is married.”
Tori made a nose like that was of little consequence and shook her head. “Well, okay, first of all, have you seen her husband? I have little doubt she wouldn’t ditch his cheating ass for your fine piece with little convincing.” She sighed and sipped. “Besides, I didn’t mean you were a snack for her.” She waggled her eyebrows and I frowned.
“David is not on my radar and never will be,” I murmured.
“Of course not. Your boyfriend kind of complicates that, doesn’t he?” she teased.
I gave her a warning look.
“Oh, don’t be a wet blanket.” She leaned back fully on the sofa in my parents’ basement and tugged me down to huddle with her. “Brilliant move, by the way. Pretending to have a boyfriend just to avoid being set up. Can’t believe they’ve bought it for this long.”
I casually glanced over my shoulder to ensure my parents weren’t able to overhear us. “Yeah, well, I’m a genius sometimes.”
“Don’t they ask why he’s never on your Instagram? Or Facebook? What’s that saying? ‘If it’s not on Facebook, it didn’t happen.’”
I rolled my eyes at her. “That’s a stupid saying.”
“Only because you don’t live and die by social media. Speaking of…” she held her phone up in front of us and nudged me. “Act like you actually like me, Hols.”
“I do like you, for the most part,” I said mildly. “When you’ve been imbibing, the like meter is just a bit lower.” I tapped her nose and she nudged me again, so I did my duty and smiled for the photo.
“Loosen up, Hols. It’s your first summer party at your parents’ where you can actually drink.”
“Someone has to drive you home. If I drink, my parents will insist on us staying the night.”
Tori coughed on the gulp of wine she’d just taken. “You’re right, you are a fucking genius.” She pushed her long, honey-colored locks from her face and blinked up at me. “For real, though. How do you explain the fact that you have zero selfies with him on the ‘gram?”
I shrugged, watching Mrs. DeBier’s movement in my periphery. She circled us like a shark wanting to move in for the kill. When she was safely out on the patio, along with the rest of my parents’ guests, I turned to Tori. “I don’t post anyone on my social media. Not even my sloppy best friend.”
“Hey.” She jutted her chin out defensively. “I’m only sloppy when the alcohol is free.”
“When is the alcohol not free for you?” I laughed.
“If you didn’t have a fake boyfriend and a real aversion to the alcohols, you too could benefit from a free drink now and again.” She tugged my hair. “Hols, you’re so pretty. For real. You shouldn’t waste your time with fake people when the real thing is so much better.”
“I tried that,” I said. I thought of high school, when dating had been fun. For a few weeks. But my reputation for being a brown-nosing bitch preceded me, and thus made me someone that guys weren’t interested in. When you were surrounded by people as gorgeous as Tori and my other friends, it was easy to disappear. Which was the way I liked it, anyway. “Besides, the moment I’m on the market, my dad will drag me to all of his shindigs and make sure I snag someone he approves of.”
“You’re his show pony.”
“Basically.” I sighed and wished, for a second, I could have even a little bit of Tori’s carefree nature. To not be worried about anything, to go with the flow and still succeed beyond my wildest imaginations sounded like something out of a daydream. But it was Tori’s reality. Not that she hadn’t worked for it; she had. She’d graduated college early and now had the luxury of spending a year camped out her parents’ place until she figured out what to do with her life. And still, she w
as easily the most chill person I had ever known.
“Oooh,” Tori said. “Adam Oliver liked my photo.” She waggled her eyebrows at me and I controlled my face to show no emotion.
“Adam…” I said, pretending to try to place him.
“Ha,” Tori said, her attention on me. “We’re going to play that game? Let me refresh your memory.” She thrust her wine glass in my hand and then grasped hair on either side of her head, pulling so she tied it under her chin. Her eyes half-closed and she had the look of someone floating in a daydream. “‘I’ll take his dick for five-hundred. Who is, Adam Oliver.’”
I shoved her, not needing that reminder. “Shut up.”
“Okay, how about the notebook you carried through middle school? The one scrawled with Hollis Oliver in your best script.”
My cheeks warmed. “You’re so mean sometimes.”
“Remember how we’d go to the sub shop practically every weekend in the summer just so you could stare at him as he layered on your cucumber slices just so?” She sounded breathy and silly and I couldn’t help but laugh with her.
“You’re awful.”
“Yeah, you’re hot for Adam Oliver.”
“I was hot for Adam Oliver. The distinction is important.” Because Adam might have found me silly in middle school and part way into high school, but he certainly hated me by the time graduation rolled around. And I couldn’t blame him.
“You’re still hot for him.”
“I am not.”
“Oh geez, Hollis. You’re as transparent as water.”
I crossed my arms over my chest but then uncrossed them when I realized how childish I probably looked.
“That’s why Mr. Fake Boyfriend is a piano player, isn’t it?” I gave her a warning look, but she had snapped her wine glass back and polished it off. “Come on, admit it.”
“Adam plays the keyboard, for a band, a thousand miles away. He’s not exactly traveling the world as a solo act.”
One Little Lie: a hate to love rom-com Page 4
