“I just think,” Ella starts again, softer this time, like a different approach might work, “that if he’d talked to someone about it first?—”
“He didn’t want to talk to someone about it.” I turn to look at her. “It’s his proposal. It has nothing to do with us. So whatever you’re working through right now, work through it quietly because it’s the last fucking thing I want to talk about.”
She presses her lips together and crosses her arms. “I have to use the bathroom. I’ll be right back.”
She pulls out her phone, and turns to make her way around the other people in line.
“Take your time,” I say.
I watch her go, heading the opposite direction from the restrooms we passed ten minutes ago. She’s typing furiously, barely looking where she’s going.
I hope she’s not texting her father, telling him I’m being a dick. Which I know I am. That won’t end up well for me.
I turn back toward the game booths.
Owen and Sawyer are sitting on a bench a few feet from where they were before, and they look…Fuck, they look so happy.
I hate how that makes me feel. It’s bubbling up from my gut, physically manifesting in ways that I know aren’t healthy. I already have a headache from clenching my damn jaw all day, and now my chest is tight, my breathing ragged. What the hell am I supposed to do?
The person behind me taps my shoulder and I glare at him unintentionally. He clears his throat. “Sorry. It’s just your turn to order.”
I run my hand through my hair. “Oh, sorry.”
I order a Coke that I don’t even want, and end up chewing the ice more than anything else before dumping it in the trash.
They kiss. It’s nothing crazy, only a bit more than a peck, but it hits me like a bullet to the chest.
I need to get out of here. Grab Ella, and go home, back to Ashford, out of Lake Mercer. I don’t want to be here for this proposal…I can’t stand another second of perfect Owen and pretend Sawyer. She can’t be as happy as she looks. I know her. The real her. And it’s my own fucking fault her lips are on my brother’s and not mine.
That’s what kills me the most.
I pull out my phone to text Ella when I notice Owen get up, looking at his own phone.
He says something, then they start walking.
I pocket my phone and follow.
Chapter 6
Sawyer
Owen is the absolute worst at ring toss. If he suddenly became a master I’d be highly suspicious, though. It’s kind of his thing.
“Come on, you bastard,” he mutters, bouncing another plastic ring off the neck of a glass bottle. It clatters to the ground with all the others. “This is rigged.”
“It’s absolutely rigged,” I agree, leaning against the booth’s counter. “Or maybe you just don’t have what it takes.”
He turns and narrows his eyes. “How dare you?” Then he slaps down another five dollars, and the attendant is all too happy to provide him another three rings. “Tenth time is the charm.”
We’ve been at this for twenty excruciating minutes. Owen’s determined to win me the legendary giant stuffed unicorn hanging from the ceiling. It’s so aggressively glittery and neon that you could probably see it from space. I swear that same one has been here our entire lives. I’ve never seen a single soul carrying one around the park in all these years.
“You don’t have to do this,” I plead with him, more for myself than him at this point. “I don’t even really want it.”
“Yes, you do. You’ve been staring at it since we were fourteen.” He lines up his shot, poking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth in concentration.
He’s not wrong. There’s something about that stupid unicorn that’s always caught my eye. Maybe because it’s so absurd and so tacky and just so perfectly Wonder World. Or maybe I just want what I can never have.
Owen tosses the first ring. It bounces off the rim and lands in the graveyard below.
