Thirty-eight

Henley

I watch Conner walk away and it’s everything I can do to keep myself from chasing after him. As much as I want to though, I know that I can’t. It should have occurred to me that someone I knew would be attending Harvard. Cambridge is a stone’s throw away from Fenway. It stands to reason that I would run into somebody I know. I just didn’t expect it to be here.

But, to be honest, I don’t really care about why Dalton is here or who he might tell about seeing me. Not right now.

I just watched Conner grab some random girl by the hand and drag her down the hall, toward the bathrooms.

“Who was that guy?” Dalton says, forcing me to look at him. To pay attention.

“He’s no one.” I smile up at him, shaking my head. “Just someone I used to know.”

“He’s kind of a dick,” Dalton says, throwing side-eye down the hall. “Where’d you meet him?”

“I grew up here,” I tell him before I can really think about what I’m saying. After she married Spencer, my mother wove some ridiculous story about living abroad. I attended boarding school in Geneva until my father, who was a foreign diplomat, died and we returned to the states. Dalton’s heard the story. Everyone I know in New York has. My sudden appearance at Trinity was a huge deal back then. Despite the speculation about my pedigree, the fact that I arrived on the arm of Jeremy Bradford made me practically bullet-proof. Eventually, my dead diplomat dad and boarding school lie became truth.

As if to prove it, he frowns at me. “You grew up in Europe. Went to a boarding school in Switzerland.”

“Nope.” I look at him. “I grew up here, in Fenway. Went to public school. Lived in a third-floor walk-up, just around the corner. Played baseball and I was as ugly as a drowned cat.” When Dalton looks at me like I’m crazy, I laugh. There’s nothing humorous about the sound. “Seriously. Nose job.” I point at my nose before dropping down to my teeth. “Veneers.” I shift over to jab at my cheek. “Dermatologist to get rid of the freckles—that one’s still a work in progress—all done the summer my mother married Spencer. The only thing that stuck was my name. She even got rid of my brother.” Thinking about Ryan, how I just went along with my mother’s lies, let her abandon him, I feel ashamed. “He’s twenty-seven. An Army Ranger.” She is my mother, but I don’t explain it to him. I just want to get away from him. “Will you excuse me, I think I need to find the ladies room.”

I don’t wait for an answer. I just walk away, weaving my way through the crowded bar, toward the hallway I watched Conner disappear down a few minutes ago.

He’s not alone. I know what I’m going to see. What he’s doing. The same thing he was doing to me, twenty-four hours ago.

The door to the office opens just as I approach and the woman I watched him pull down the hall tumbles out, hastily re-buttoning her shirt. “Oh.” She looks at me, cheeks flushed, before aiming an embarrassed smile over her shoulder just as Conner appears in the doorway to lean against the frame. His belt is undone, the front of his jeans open like he just pulled them up.

I feel like I’ve been stabbed in the chest. Like I’m bleeding out, right in front of him. Which is stupid because I knew. I knew who he was. What this was.

I knew.

And I asked for it anyway.

“Hey, Daisy.” He gives me a crooked grin before aiming a look at the girl between us. “This is…” He cocks his head at her. “Tara?”

“Kaitlyn.” She blushes again aiming a look at my shoulder.

“Nice to meet you, Kaitlyn,” I say, holding out my free hand. “I’m Henley.”

Ladies remain calm.

Ladies keep their cool.

Ladies don’t smash their empty glasses into other ladies’ faces and use the shards to dig out their eyeballs.

She takes my hand slowly like she can read my mind and doesn’t want to risk blindness. Giving it a single shake, she lets go. “Excuse me,” she says, giving me a quick, apologetic smile while scooting around me.

And then she’s gone.

When I look at him, Conner isn’t grinning anymore. The green of his eyes is dark. Guarded. “You lost?”

“Nope.” Why do people keep asking me that? “I know exactly where I am.” I push my way past him, into the office.

It’s a mess. Papers on the floor. Scattered around the desk. Half-empty bottle of whiskey tipped over, pouring a puddle onto the floor. For some reason, it makes me think of my father. All the times I took his half-empty bottles after he passed out and dumped them down the sink. I pick it up, pouring what little is left into my glass.

“Please, come in,” he says to my back. “Make yourself at home.”

I don’t answer, I just down my stolen drink.

“You need somethin’, Daisy?”

Yes, to have my head examined.

“What will happen if Dalton drops your name during his interview with that law firm?” It’s not what I want to say. Not what I want to ask.

Who was that girl?

Did you fuck her?

Did you call her Daisy?

But I don’t ask any of those things because I’m afraid the answer is yes to all three.

“He’ll either get the internship on the spot or get escorted out of the building by security.” I can hear it in his tone, which one he hopes it will be. “It’s founding partner, and I have a complicated history.”

I toss him a look over my shoulder. He’s where I left him, standing in the doorway. Watching me. “Slept with his daughter, did you?”

“I don’t sleep with women,” he says, leaning his shoulder against the doorframe again. “I fuck them. And no—but Cap’n did.”

Cap’n. That’s what they all call his cousin, Patrick. I make a sound in the back of my throat, one that I hope sounds casual and not at all like I’m relieved.

“Tess and I are thinking of going for pancakes.” I set my glass down next to the one Conner’s latest conquest left behind. Seeing them side-by-side strikes me as funny for some reason. “Want to go?” I ask, finally turning around to look at him.

He looks like he wants to throw me out. Like he would if the job didn’t involve actually having to touch me. “No,” he says, giving his zipper a terse upward jerk. “I’ve got plans.”

“With Kaitlyn?” I don’t know why I say it. Probably because I’m jealous. I shouldn’t be. Have no right to be.

But I am.

Now he smirks at me. “Told ya, Daisy,” he says, threading his belt through its buckle. “I don’t do repeats.”

I nod my head. “That is what you said…” Forcing a smirk of my own onto my face, I cross the short distance between the desk and the doorway, trying not to think about what was happening in it before I interrupted. Stopping in front of him, I raise myself onto my toes, bringing my mouth as close to his ear as I can so I can whisper in it. “But I’m still hoping you’ll change your mind.”

 

I find Tess sitting in the same booth Conner was sitting at this afternoon when I met him for lunch.

“Where have you been?” she says, looking up at me while I slide into the seat across from her.

“Ran into an old friend from high school,” I say, completely leaving out the part where I practically walked in on Conner having sex with another woman.

“I am your old friend from high school,” she says, laughing at me. “Ohhh,” She raises an eyebrow at me. “You mean one of the pretty people.”

“They’re not all bad.” I feel this insane urge to defend myself. Defend what I let my mother turn me into. “Dalton went to Trinity on a scholarship. His father was a fireman who died in 9/11. His mom is a school teacher.”

For a second neither one of us says anything. But then her gaze lands on the ring on my finger, and I jerk my hand back, hiding it under the table just like I did this afternoon with Connor. “Jesus Christ, Henley, you are getting married.”

“Yes.” I wince a little. Saying it out loud makes me feel horrible. Makes what I did much more real. “Sort of.” I amend, hoping it buys me a little good grace.

“Sort of?” Her gaze bounces up and narrows on my face. “Define sort of.”

I hesitate, but only for second before I tell her everything. About Jeremy being gay. About us faking a relationship to please our families. About our plan to fake a marriage to secure his trust fund. His family is ultra conservative. His trust fund clearly states he must be married by the time he’s thirty, or he will receive nothing. As much as I love Jeremy, I know there’s no way he’d survived without his family’s money.

When I’m finished, Tess leans back in her seat, taking her drink with her. “Wow. Five years for 500 million.” She gives a low whistle. “That’s a hell of a payday,” she says, rattling the ice cube in her glass. “What’ll you do with that kind of money?”

Buy my freedom.

Instead of saying it, I just shrug.

“So why did you come back?” She sets her glass down on the table between us, shaking her head. “And don’t give me that I have a library internship bullshit story. I want the real reason.”

The real reason? The real reason is something I’m not ready to say out loud. Not even to her.

“I met Jeremy a week after I left. We spent nearly the entire summer in the Hamptons together—my stepfather and his father are good friends. I was freaking out. Everything I knew was gone. My brother. You. Conner. My dad…” I shrug. “Jeremy was there for me. We became friends. Real friends. Before we went back to the city, he told me he was gay and that he wasn’t ready to come out. That he couldn’t because of his father. He proposed a way to for me to gain instant acceptance into his very tight, very judgmental social circle while helping him hide his sexuality from his family.”

“He wanted you to pretend to be his girlfriend,” Tess says, reading behind the lines perfectly.

I nod. “I’ve been in a fake relationship with my gay best friend for almost nine years now.” I tilt my drink, watching the whiskey climb the side of my glass. “I left here a virgin, Tess. Think about that for a minute.”

I know when she understands what I’m telling her because her eyes go wide and her mouth falls open. “You came back here to lose your virginity to Conner?” She looks like she’s on the verge of passing out. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s it? That’s all you wanted from him? Sex—nothing else?”

“Yes.” I force myself to say it even though the lie burns my throat, hotter than the whiskey. “From what I’ve heard from my brother, my leaving didn’t slow Connor down in the slightest when it comes to women.” Even as I say, I remember him sitting in the seat Tess is sitting in now. The look of stunned horror on his face when he realized who I was. “Casual sex is his bread-and-butter. He doesn’t care who he sleeps with.” Even as I say it, I know it’s not entirely true. Conner does care. If I’d given him a choice, if I’d told him who I was last night, he wouldn’t have touched me. He made that perfectly clear. “So, why not me?”

Tess studies me for a minute, her full mouth drawn into a thin, grim line. I can’t decide if she’s trying to rein in her temper or keep from laughing in my face. When she finally opens her mouth, it’s to change the subject completely. “Do you want to marry this Jeremy guy?”

“He’s my friend, and he needs my help.” I know it’s not the answer she’s looking for, but it’s the only answer I can give. The truth feels too much like a betrayal.

Tess nods her head like she understands. The Tess I know would do anything for someone she cared about, but just because she understands, doesn’t mean she likes it. “When this goes bad—and it will go bad—I need you to understand that I’m with Connor, all the way. It won’t matter to me what he does or how badly he behaves. I’m with him.” She enunciates her words and speaks clearly. “He could murder the world, and you’d find me, following along behind him with a shovel, burying the evidence.”

There are so many things about Tess that I’ve missed. Her hard, bone-crushing hugs. Her way of speaking plainly. Her dry, sarcastic wit. But it’s her blind loyalty that I’ve missed the most. Knowing that she’s no longer loyal to me hurts more than I want to admit.

“I understand.” Setting my glass flat on the table, I straighten my shoulders. “Now what?”

“I’ll tell you now what.” Tess drains her glass before slamming it onto the table between us. “Now we’re gonna go to Benny’s, and you’re buying my ass some pancakes.”