I snatched the notebook from him, tore out the page with multiple Jacks on it, and ripped it up into pieces. He watched me do it and then started to say something, but gave up before the first syllable came out of his mouth.
I wanted a reaction, though, so I kept needling. “You want toeatthem to make sure?” I held out the pieces to him. He reached out slowly, took them from me, and stuffed them in his pants pocket. But still he said nothing.
That was okay. I was spilling enough bile for the both of us. I just couldn’t seem to stop. “So, Mr. Down-low,” I said, “guess this means I can’t even tell Nate I scored tonight?”
He grabbed my shoulder. “You can’t tellanyoneabout what we just did.” I tried to pull away, but he just seized my other arm as well and gave me a little shake. “Imeanit. This isn’t a game. You can’t use me for bragging rights.”
That wasn’t how it was at all, but all I wanted to do right then was make him angry, like I was angry. “Listen, man, you want to hide who you are, that’s your business. But I’m not ashamed of being me, and I’m no one’s dirty little secret.”
He let me go then. “You don’t understand.”
“Oh, I get it,bud. Believe me. You’re not the first closet case I’ve had in my mouth.” I made sure he was looking right at me when I added pointedly, “And you won’t be the last, either.”
“I’m not—”
But I turned away. “How about you get the fuck out of my house and off my property?” I walked to the decorative mirror on the wall and smoothed out my hair. He’d pulled it into a damn bird’s nest while I was sucking him, and that just irritated me all the more. But there was such a pregnant pause that I had to look at him in the mirror. “Well? What are you waiting for?”
He sighed. “I left my hat down at the pool.”
“Then I guess you’re going out the same way you got in: jumping the fence. Seriously, man, you got what you wanted tonight, didn’t you?” I saw his reflection wince and turned to face him. “I mean, youwantedto question me about Annie,” I taunted. “Isn’t that right?”
He was back to keeping his eyes above my neck at all times. “Thanks for your help,” he told me, clipped and mechanical. He grabbed his jacket from the couch, gave a short nod, and left.
It was so fucking typical. Maybe I still had residual Daddy issues I was trying to work through, but all the men I decided might be worth more than just one nightalwaysturned out to be unavailable assholes. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he was, too.
And yet I was.
* * *
The sun had set when I came back outside, and the strings of lights down the path to the pool were glowing. As I stomped back down to the party, I wanted to regain the optimistic happiness of earlier, so I thought again about Annie, about how she was fine, and warmer than usual in her responses. But Jack had chipped away at that quiet joy, as well, because his question about whether the texts had sounded like her kept swimming back into my mind.
The thing was…theydidn’treally sound like Annie. For so many reasons. The emoji, for one thing. She never used emojis with me, not these days. The willingness to let me in on a career move was another odd thing. And the weirdest thing of all was her brevity. When Annie texted, she texted big fucking blocks of words, mostly about how amazing her life was, and I always had to get the phone to read them to me.
Today’s texts? Two words each. Crystal clear.
Itwasn’tAnnie behind those texts. I grew more certain of that by the second, and more determined to get hold of Jack and tell him. Despite what had gone down between us, heneededto know what I’d just figured out.
When I reached the party, I could see Jack across the other side of the pool, standing near the pathway that led further into the garden. He’d been waylaid by Teddy McCallum, and he was pulling his hat down low, shaking his head and pushing Teddy’s phone away. Like most people, Jack didn’t seem thrilled by the idea of being on Teddy’s YouTube channel.
And then Jack looked my way. I felt his intense eyes on me once more, and his shoulders, so tight, suddenly relaxed as he seemed to come to a decision. He raised a hand toward me—a hand of greeting, of surrender.
He didn’t want to leave things like we’d left them.
Neither did I.
My heart lifted as I walked toward him, and a strange sense of inevitability settled over me, a certainty thatthiswas how things had been supposed to happen.
That from now on, my life was going to change, change completely.
But the feeling was broken by Nate calling out to me from the pool. “Where the fuck haveyoubeen, Milly?”
When I looked toward him, he had the same shit-eating grin on his face that he got every time I picked up some guy on a night out or at a party. Usually I didn’t care. Usually I would just grin back, shrug in aguess I’m a hokind of way, and then maybe even see if I could find another guy for a second round.
I knew it wasn’t healthy. That I was compensating for a whole bunch of emotional bullshit, that I was trying to prove to myself that people still liked me. Stillwantedme. But Nate didn’t know that.
I’d never resented his teasing before. Tonight, though, in the yellow lights around the pool, that smirk on his face was infuriating.
I stopped to give Nate the finger, but when I turned back toward Jack, he’d disappeared. For one crazy moment I thought about sprinting through the grounds to try to find him, pulling him down from the wall he was presumably climbing—God, I hadn’tmeantthat bitchy little comment, didn’t he see that?—but it was too late. I didn’t know which way he’d gone.
