She was losing control.
There were so many people she needed to be. With Adam, the bitter, unforgiving ex; with Harper, the tough rival; with her family, the reliable caretaker. She’d thought that with her old friends she could relax and just be herself, but they didn’t want that. They wanted yet another Beth, a world weary refuge from the popular crowd who could give them the inside scoop on a world they’d never inhabit.
So many masks to wear, and none of them fit, not really. She didn’t know who she was anymore—and she no longer had the energy to figure it out.
Harper was back. So much for skulking in the shadows and hiding under the covers. That wasn’t going to get her anything. It wasn’t going to get her Adam. And it wasn’t going to get her revenge.
So Friday night, she’d whipped out her cell phone and called Kaia and Kane. It was time for a council of war, and these two were battle-tested.
“Nice to see you out of bed, Grace,” Kane commented as they settled into a booth in the back of Bourquin’s Coffee Shop.
“It’s even nicer to see me in it,” Harper quipped, “not that you’ll ever know.”
Kane grinned, and Kaia set down a tray of frothy iced coffees.
“And the plan is … ?” she began, arching an eyebrow.
“I thought that was your department,” Harper joked—and then the smile faded from her face. After all, the last plan Kaia’d come up with had led to disaster. It had, ultimately, led them here.
“We all agree it was Beth?” Kane asked, delicately holding the notorious flyer between two fingers as if afraid to get his hands dirty.
“I still say she couldn’t have done it alone,” Kaia pointed out.
“She’s very resourceful,” Harper put in quickly. She’d deal with Miranda—her own way, in her own time.
“You’re the one who always told me she was a waste of space,” Kane reminded her.
“And you’re the one who always told me I underestimated her,” Harper argued. “Obviously you were right.”
Kane closed his eyes and took a deep breath, as if inhaling her words. “Music to my ears. But you sound surprised—when are you going to learn that I’m always right?”
“So, Mr. Right,” Kaia said, leaning forward eagerly. “You know her best—how do we take her down?”
Silence fell over the table.
“If we had proof, we could just turn her in,” Harper mused. But there was no proof—and, besides, ratting her out to the authorities seemed such an inelegant solution. Why pass the buck to the administration when they could handle the problem themselves?
Kane put down his coffee and looked up at the girls, his lips pulling back into a cold smile. “I can tell you what her pretty little heart desires the most this week—”
“Not you,” Kaia and Harper quipped at the same time. Their eyes met, and they burst into laughter. Kane’s expression didn’t change.
“If you two are done …”
The girls nodded, adopting identical we’ll be good expressions.
“As I was saying, if I know Beth, there’s only one thing she wants this week: something flashy that would impress colleges and cement her goody-goody rep once and for all …”
“She could prove to the whole school that she’s the best,” Kaia said thoughtfully.
“All the teachers would love her,” Kane pointed out.
“And she’d get to feel like a VIP, superior to the rest of us,” Kaia added, with a knowing smile.
“Well?” Harper asked in confusion, growing tired of the game. The two of them were having way too much fun stringing this out. “What?”
“That speech for the governor,” Kane explained. “I hear she’s going for it, and she hasn’t got any real competition. Unless …”
“Wouldn’t it be a shame,” Kaia picked up, “if someone stole it out from under her? Someone prettier, more popular, someone she probably thinks can’t string two words together?”
“And maybe she finds out that she can’t just flutter those blue eyes and get everything she wants,” Kane concluded.
“Especially”—Kaia grabbed the flyer from him and tore it in two—“if she’s going to play with fire.”
“And exactly who do you—” Harper stopped as the obvious sunk in. “You want me to write the damn speech? Put on a show for the governor like the principal’s trained monkey?”
“Who better to beat her out than her sworn enemy?” Kaia pointed out. “The one who already stole everything worth having?”
It did have a certain beauty to it.
And Harper did so love to win.
“Are you guys sure about this?” Harper asked.
“Second thoughts, Grace?” Kane asked, arching an eyebrow. “This was your idea.”
“She tried to trash our lives,” Kaia pointed out. “Yours, most of all.”
Harper didn’t want to say what she was thinking—that maybe Beth had lost enough.
“You know Adam would go back to her in a second,” Kaia reminded her. “All she’d have to do is say the word. He thinks she’s so pure, so innocent….”
Beth had brought the fight to them, Harper reminded herself, and after all, what had she really lost? Kane was right: She could have Adam back whenever she wanted. Harper was the one left alone, groveling for forgiveness that might never come.
Didn’t Beth expect a little payback for that? More to the point, didn’t she deserve it?
“All right,” Harper conceded. “I’m in. All in.”
“Good decision,” Kaia said, clinking her mug against Harper’s. “To revenge.”
“To winning,” Kane added, clinking their glasses with his own.
Harper paused just before taking a sip, and added one more toast. “To justice.”
Kaia checked her watch on the way out of the coffee shop. She had just enough time to head home and change, before meeting Reed. Or she could stop by Guido’s Pizza early and see if he was ready for her. If not, she could at least sit there as he worked. She loved watching his sure movements behind the counter, tossing the dough, smearing the sauce across a fresh crust, sprinkling the cheese. She’d never thought fast-food preparation could be so hot.
She slid in behind the wheel of the BMW, but before she could decide which way to turn out of the lot, her cell phone rang.
“Good news. My dinner engagement has been cancelled. I’m free for the night. Be here in half an hour.”
Kaia chewed on the corner of her lip and tapped her index finger against the phone. Powell liked to order her around. It gave him the illusion he was in control.
“Can’t—plans,” she said quickly.
“Forget them,” he suggested. “I have a special treat for you.”
For a moment, Kaia was tempted—but as she thought of Reed’s lopsided grin, and the way his rumpled, curly hair always made it look like he’d just climbed out of bed, the temptation passed.
“Sorry,” she told him, her flat tone making it clear that, as usual, she wasn’t.
“What could be more important than a night with me?” Powell asked.
“What’s the difference?” Kaia snapped, suddenly unwilling to make up a lie. This wasn’t a relationship, after all—they were under no obligation to each other. That was the beauty of it, at least until he’d turned into the amazing human jellyfish, wrapping his tentacles around her at any opportunity for fear she’d slip away. “I’m not coming.”
“Tu me manques,” Powell said. I miss you. “Mon amour.” My love. He knew very well that she couldn’t resist when he spoke to her in French.
“I’ll come now,” she said with a sigh, regretting it almost as soon as the words were out of her mouth. “You’ve got twenty minutes.”
“You say that now, but you know you won’t want to leave.” She could hear the smug grin behind his words and, as always, it repulsed her—and turned her on. “You know you can’t say no to me.”
“Twenty minutes. That’s it.”
Kaia clicked
the phone shut, cutting off his laughter. So, new plan: two guys in one night. She’d double-dipped in the dating pool before, but this time felt different.
Kaia pulled out onto the road, turning toward Powell’s dingy side of town. She refused to let herself slip into some kind of juvenile relationship, imagining that she and Reed were “going steady”—it was a slippery slope and, before you knew it, she’d likely be sucked into a downward spiral of gooey love poems, Valentine’s Day candy, pathetic pop songs, and dithering about whether “he loves me” or “he loves me not.”
That was unacceptable, and even if she didn’t particularly want to see Powell tonight or suffer through his groping fingers and pompous Brit wit, she would, anyway, just as a reminder that she was free. Kaia had never let herself be obligated to anyone—as far as she was concerned, it was a step away from ownership, and no one owned her. No one ever would.
“Now that is a fine piece of ass!” The second-string point guard leaped out of his chair and pushed his way to the edge of the stage, waving a wad of dollar bills in the air.
Adam looked around the table searching for a bemused expression to match his own, but saw only naked desire in his teammates’ eyes. So what was wrong with Adam? Three half-naked women dancing onstage a few feet away, their perfect bodies gyrating to a hard, driving beat—and all he could do was stare into his glass and wallow in his own pain?
“You’re pathetic, man!” one of the guys complained, clapping him hard on the back. “Stop sulking and look where we are.This is heaven.”
Heaven, or Mugs ‘n’ Jugs, a triple X strip club on Route 47 that promised Live! Nude! Girls! and failed to card even its most obvious underage patrons. Adam had made the traditional pilgrimage out here for his sixteenth birthday, but hadn’t been back since.
Now he remembered why. Sure, a few of the girls were hot, parading across the stage in their barely-there costumes, this one a tiger-lady, that one a vampiress, all of them flashing the same fuck me look at their loser clientele. But once you tore your eyes away from all that bare skin, you couldn’t help but notice all the depressing details: the worn-out speaker system, piping the same five songs on a maddening continuous loop; the overpriced drinks and underpaid waitresses; the middle-aged businessmen who’d snuck away from their dreary lives to spend a few hours pretending that the strippers were performing just for them, that their bored come hither expressions were more than just business.
“Why’d you drag me here?” he complained, shouting to be heard over the loud techno beat. “I thought we were just going to shoot some pool.”
“What are you complaining about?” the center asked. “Look around you and tell me this isn’t better than pool.” He looked up at the waitress, who’d stopped at their table to clear their drinks, and was leaning so low across Adam that her bare midriff brushed his shoulder. “Hey, baby,” the center leered, and pointed toward the stage. “Why aren’t you up there with the rest of the hotties?”
Adam cringed, but thankfully, the waitress ignored the idiot. She turned to Adam instead. He cringed again.
“Hey, sweetie, why so glum?” she asked, stroking her finger across his jawline. “Don’t see anything you like?”
Adam took a deep breath, almost choking on the heady mix of smoke and cheap perfume.
“It’s not that,” he stuttered. “I’m … uh …”
“Distracted,” the waitress guessed. She slapped a small glass down on the table and poured him a shot. “It’s a girl, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s—” How to answer that? He couldn’t get his mind off a girl, yes, but which girl? The one he wanted to kiss, or the one he wanted to throttle?
“It’s always a girl,” the waitress said knowingly. She poured a second shot, then lifted the glass herself. “She’s not worth it, kid. You’re too young for that face.” She squeezed his cheeks together and gave his face a gentle shake, like a grandmother doting on her angelic little boy. Then, in a decidedly un-grandmotherly move, she wrapped his fingers around his glass, clinking hers against it.
“To forgetting,” she toasted, and downed the shot. She looked at him expectantly, and so he tipped his head back and dumped the drink into his mouth, trying not to choke as the cheap tequila lit a fire down his throat.
“You’re still frowning, kid.”
“I—”
“Let’s try this.” And the waitress put down her tray, grabbed his face with both hands, pulled it toward hers, and kissed him. Hard. Fast. Wet. Sloppy. And incredible.
She pulled away, and Adam just gaped at her, dazed, as the warm tequila buzz spread through his body and the cheers and hoots of his buddies beat dimly against his ears.
“There, that should do it,” she said, using her thumb to wipe away a lingering smudge of lipstick on his lips, just as his mother had done when he was a child. “Now enjoy the show.”
“That was fucking unbelievable,” the center said in a low voice.
“You are officially the luckiest guy in the world,” the point guard added, back from his failed trip to the edge of the stage.
Adam tried to smile as his buddies clapped him on the back and roared with approval. A couple years ago, this whole scene would have been a dream come true. But he wasn’t that guy anymore. Not even a hot kiss from a hot, half-naked woman could change that. The kiss just made things worse; he was ashamed to be there, because he knew Beth would be ashamed, if she ever found out—if she even cared.
“Woo-hoo, baby!” the center cried, waving a fistful of cash at the blond bombshell who was sliding up and down a metal pole a few feet away. “Bring it on!”
Adam sighed and closed his eyes. If he couldn’t leave, he could at least pretend he was somewhere else, with someone else. He’d gotten good at pretending, lately; real life was so much easier to handle when you just ignored it.
Kaia tipped back her head to catch the last few drops of liquid in the glass, then sucked in an ice cube. She needed something bitingly cool to distract her. Sitting this close to Reed, with a table keeping their bodies apart, was driving her crazy.
She’d met him at Guido’s as planned, and they were sharing a free pizza before making their escape. She of course hadn’t mentioned anything about her unplanned pit stop on the way. Not because he would have had any right to know, she reminded herself, and certainly not because she felt guilty—it just wasn’t worth the trouble. She’d met Powell at his apartment and used his desperation as leverage to achieve an unprecedented goal: open windows. Usually obsessively paranoid about keeping every moment of their encounter shut off from the public view, Powell had let himself be cajoled into pulling up the blinds, giving Kaia her first ever look at the view from his apartment. It was, as she’d expected, just as squalid as the apartment itself. Then came the true triumph: persuading Powell to open the sliding-glass door at the back of his bungalow and actually take her outside, if you could count a five-by-five-foot fenced-in square of weeds and gravel as “outside.”
They had stood for a moment at the threshold gazing out at the claustrophobic patch as if it were the Garden of Eden and they were considering a rebellious return, and then Powell had taken her hand and led her into the not-so-great outdoors. It was dirty and uncomfortable, and something about the fresh air or the fear of discovery had made Powell more insatiable than usual, nearly endangering her twenty minutes-and-out plan, but it had been well worth it. She’d talked him into breaking his own rules, just for the privilege of being with her, and there was nothing sweeter than that. Or at least, that’s how she had felt until Reed had greeted her with a kiss, fully unaware that he was getting used goods, and her victory began to feel unsettlingly hollow.
“You miss it? Home?” Reed asked, nibbling on a piece of crust.
Kaia opened her mouth to give Reed her well-rehearsed speech on the wonders of Manhattan, from the sample sales and the galleries to the way the skyscrapers sliced into the sky on a clear winter morning, from sneaking into club openings and showing up on “Pag
e Six,” to meeting up at dawn for a goat cheese omelet and bread fresh from the farmers’ market before sneaking home to bed. But she stopped before she said anything.
“I don’t know,” she admitted—and it was the first time she’d let herself think it, much less speak it aloud. “Sometimes I miss it—I hate it here. But … I hated it there, too.”
Another guy might have seized the moment to put on the fake sympathy, giving her a “comforting” pat on the thigh and maybe letting his hand rest there a bit too long.
Reed simply asked, “Why?”
“I don’t know.” And, with another guy, she would have taken this as her cue to heave a calculated sigh, designed to elicit pity or to highlight her ample, heaving chest. Instead, a small, light shiver of air escaped her as her body sagged with the energy of wondering: What was wrong with her life? “There was my mother. Total bitch. And my—I guess you’d call them my friends.” She laughed harshly at the thought. “But that wasn’t it. I just …”
Reed took her hand—and she knew it wasn’t in sympathy or empathy, but out of a desperate need to touch her, because she felt it too.
“I didn’t fit there. Not that I fit here,” she added, laughing bitterly.
“Know what you mean,” Reed said quietly, shaking his head. “But what can you do?”
Kaia didn’t say anything, just pressed his hand tightly to her lips. She could never say it out loud, but she knew that, bizarrely, she did fit somewhere. Here, with him. And at least there was some comfort in that.
“Are we having a good time yet?” Harper asked snidely, wrinkling her nose after sipping a whiskey sour that tasted more like fermented lemonade. Kane had promised her a night to remember at an exclusive underground after-hours lounge at the outskirts of town. He’d failed to mention that by “exclusive” he meant “restricted to those qualified for membership in the AARP”; “after hours,” on the other hand, apparently meant “after the early bird special.”