“Who did you need to talk to that badly?” She was only a few inches taller than me, but Mary Beth drew herself up to her full height. Her hands were clenched in front of her, gloves wrinkling.
Bee was at my elbow now, her brows drawn together, confusion and suspicion obvious on her face.
“Just this girl,” I said, hating the words the second they were out of my mouth. Why hadn’t I thought of an excuse? Something that sounded the least bit plausible?
Maybe it was because I was tired of making excuses. Tired of lying to everyone about everything. Even Bee, who I’d let in closest of all, still didn’t have any idea about what was really going on.
“It was a scholarship chick,” David piped up from his corner. He was standing up now, shoving the book in his back pocket. “Harper and I are up for the same scholarship, and I’m gonna be honest, I was trying my best to suck up. Pres—Harper here ran out to talk to her, too. Hence spilling the soup.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Now can we please stop being crazy and get back to prancing around a mansion in wedding dresses?”
Next to me, I felt Bee relax a little. It was a plausible story, and at that moment, I could’ve kissed David. Well, no, not really. I was in no way thinking about kissing David Stark.
That seemed to put an end to it, and I was about to tell the girls to start from the top again. But before I could, Mary Beth pressed her lips together. It was like I could actually feel her steeling herself for what she was going to say next. “You’re exactly like your sister, Harper.” The words came out fast, almost like she was afraid to say them. “You act like you’re perfect, but inside, you’re totally screwed up.”
I’d been punched and stabbed and slammed into a bathroom wall. None of that hurt nearly as bad as Mary Beth’s words. I felt them everywhere, rattling my teeth, pounding into my bones. I half expected to look down and find myself covered with bruises.
I felt an arm go around my shoulders. Bee’s fingers dug into the exposed skin of my upper arm. “Mary Beth,” she said, her voice shaking a little, “I don’t know what the hell has gotten into you, but that was so out of line.”
“Seriously,” Abigail and Amanda muttered together. They wore identical frowns, two pairs of brown eyes glaring.
“In fact,” Bee continued, pulling me closer, “I think you should leave now.”
“Happily,” Mary Beth said, kicking off her heels and pulling a pair of sneakers out from under the little sofa by the door.
“Are you okay?” Bee asked once she was gone, and I made myself smile, even though I could feel how shaky it was.
“Fine,” I told her. “Mary Beth has had a thing for Ryan for a million years, and she’s jealous. It’s . . . it’s no big deal.”
Bee wrapped me in a quick hug, her collarbone pressing against my chin. “It is a big deal. Everything she said was so freaking offensive. The stuff about your sister, and David . . .”
She trailed off. Over her shoulder, I could see David, his face concerned, lips thin. I hadn’t run out on Ryan to go “hook up” with David, but hadn’t there been . . . something? Wasn’t that nearly as bad as if I had kissed him?
“And you and Ryan are good, right?” Bee pulled back, a slight crease between her brows.
“We’re great,” I said, and David suddenly turned away, pulling his book out of his back pocket. The stairs rose behind him, and all I could think was, He saw me dead there. I needed to get out of this dress. I needed to get out of Magnolia House.
“I think I’m gonna go ahead and go home,” I told the girls.
Most of them nodded sympathetically, but I saw a gleam in some eyes. Of course. Harper Jane Price was about to have a nervous breakdown in front of them. Who wouldn’t want to see that?
“Let me drive you,” David said, but I shook my head even as Bee glared at him and said, “I’ll drive her.”
“I can drive myself,” I told them, and when they both went to protest, I help up my hand. “Promise. I . . . need a break.”
I think Bee would’ve kept arguing, but I told her I would text her as soon as I got home and headed for the door before she had a chance.
I got behind the wheel of my car, meaning to head home. But when I got to the turn for my house, I went left instead of right. There was someone I needed to talk to.
Chapter 33
I DON’T KNOW what Ryan was expecting when he opened the door, but me basically launching myself at him was probably not it, if his “Whoa!” was anything to go by.
I stood in his front door, dressed in my Cotillion gown, my arms locked so tightly around his neck that I was holding my elbows, toes dangling off the ground. After a beat, he wrapped his arms around my waist.
Ducking my head, I pressed my cheek to his neck, wanting to breathe in the safe, familiar scent of him, wanting to climb inside his soft gray T-shirt, wanting to hide in him.
“Harper, are you all right?” he asked, and I shook my head, pressing closer.
He gave a sighing laugh, breath brushing my ear. “Well, whatever it is, it’ll be okay. Actually, wait.” Ryan set me back on my feet, looking me up and down, appraising. “Are you running away from a wedding? Because that might be less okay.”
I swatted at him with a watery chuckle. “This is my Cotillion dress, thank you very much.”
His hazel eyes went wide. “Ah. I thought I wasn’t supposed to see you in that.”
Waving that away, I stepped past him and into the house. “Oh, who cares?”
I walked down the hall to Ryan’s room. His parents would still be at work, so we could safely hang out in what was normally a forbidden zone.
“‘Who cares?’” Ryan echoed, following me. “Who are you, and what have you done with my girlfriend?”
Ryan’s room used to be his brother Luke’s. It couldn’t have been more different from David’s room. No maps of Middle Earth, for one thing, and not many books. There was a flatscreen mounted to the wall, and a gaming station. Ryan had been in the middle of some basketball game, but he crossed the room and turned the television off.
“So do you want to talk?” he asked, sounding a little unsure. “Or are you here so we can . . .”
He trailed off, but his gaze slid behind me to his bed.
“Talk,” I said firmly, sitting on the edge of the mattress. “For one thing, it takes too long to get this dress off and back on.”
That made him smile and took a little bit of the disappointment out of his eyes. “Okay. Can I at least do this?”
Sitting next to me, Ryan took my face in his hands and lowered his mouth to mine. Even as I reached out to clutch the front of his T-shirt, I was thinking of that first kiss on the swings at the park. The way my heart had leapt into my mouth, how every hair on my body seemed to stand on end.
It was only natural that Ryan’s kisses didn’t make me feel like that anymore. We’d been together for two years now. Those kind of sparks only belonged in new relationships, didn’t they?
Or was Mary Beth right? Was I holding on to Ryan because he was another thing for me to have? Another achievement on Harper Jane Price’s list of accomplishments? 4.0 GPA, SGA President, Homecoming Queen, Haver of Best Possible Boyfriend.
“Um, Harper?”
Ryan pulled back, his hands falling from my back. His eyes were kind of hazy, but he was starting to frown.
“What?”
“It’s customary to kiss back when a guy is kissing you.”
Ugh. I’d done it again. “Sorry,” I said, ducking my head in my best attempt to seem apologetic. “I was thinking.”
Sighing, Ryan sat back. “Of course you were.”
“You’re right. Things are weird right now,” I said. “It’ll be better after Cotillion.” That was becoming my mantra. Problem was, I wasn’t sure if that was actually true. Whatever was going to happen at Cotillion, Saylor said it would change things. Would it be for the better?
Ryan reached out and took my face in both hands, a mix of exasperation and love on his face. “You always say that,” he said, his thumbs tracing my cheekbones. “It’s always going to get better someday. Sometime in the future, things won’t be so crazy.” Leaning forward, Ryan dropped a kiss on the tip of my nose. “But the thing is, Harper, we can’t see the future. So how can you have any idea if it’s going to get any better?”
Irony, thy name is Ryan.
“Do you like Mary Beth?” I asked suddenly. One of Ryan’s pillows sat next to me, and I pulled it to my stomach.
Ryan rocked back from me, his hands lifting from my face to hover somewhere in the air around my shoulders. “Where did that— No. I mean, I like her, but not . . .”
“Right,” I said, twisting my hands in my skirt. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe Ryan. He wasn’t a bad liar like David, he just . . . didn’t. Ever, as far as I could tell. But there was something kind of unsure in his voice, something that lodged under my skin.
“Do you like David?” Ryan asked, dropping his hands to his thighs.
“No,” I said immediately. “We’re maybe not as hostile as we used to be, and he’s finally backed off on the paper thing, but that’s it as far as we go.”
But I kept thinking of sitting across from David at Miss Annemarie’s, the way he’d said Mary Beth wasn’t me. And the more I thought about it, the more confused I felt, which sucked since I’d come to Ryan’s specifically to stop feeling so confused. To feel normal.
Yes, David and I were closer now than we had been. But that was only because he was the only person other than Saylor who knew the whole truth. Of course I’d feel the odd warm fuzzy for him. So there was an obvious solution here.
“Hey, you wanna help me with something?” I asked Ryan, rising to my feet.
He quirked one auburn brow. “Is it the buttons on that dress? Because if so, then yes, very much so.”
It was flirty and jokey and I should find it charming and not slightly irritating. I reminded myself of that as I smiled back. “Not exactly. It’s research.”
The corners of Ryan’s mouth turned down and he flopped back on his bed. “Now that sounds like a great, sexy time right there,” he told the ceiling.
“It’s going to be fun,” I insisted, sweeping a pile of Sports Illustrated magazines off his desk chair and turning on his computer. “It features death and destruction and other things boys like. It’ll be like Hard Fists, only more . . . historical.”
Ryan was still lying on his bed, arms folded behind his head. He laughed. “Oh, man, Hard Fists. I hate that you missed it. There was this one part where this dude killed another dude using, shit you not, a ladle, and Mary Beth said—”
He broke off, and I pretended to be really involved in finding the perfect search engine. “So what kind of death and destruction research?” he said, finally.
“This king, Charlemagne. He had a bunch of knights who died fighting a—” I broke off, suddenly realizing that I couldn’t exactly get into all the Oracle stuff. “A bad guy,” I finished lamely. I’d read everything I could on Charlemagne’s Paladins on the internet, but there was hardly a mention of Alaric. Still, it couldn’t hurt to look again.
I rummaged around on Ryan’s desk, sifting through more Sports Illustrateds, a bunch of loose change, and a stack of video games. “Don’t you have a notebook or some paper or something?”
By now, Ryan had shifted on the bed, turning so that his feet were braced on the headboard. He was tossing the mini basketball that sat by his bed on the wall above. Catching it, he tilted his head. “You’re seriously going to do homework.”
I paused, my hand still resting on a video game, the box reading War Metal 4. “It’s not really homework. More like an . . . extracurricular project. I thought it might be fun if you were more involved in the stuff I do.”
“Why?” Ryan asked, tossing the ball again. “It’s not like you’re all that involved in the stuff I do.”
He didn’t say it accusingly, and didn’t even seem that put out by it. It was just a fact. “I cheerlead at your basketball games,” I reminded him.
He shrugged. “You were doing that before we even started dating. It’s no big deal, Harper, I’m just saying we don’t have to be all up in each other’s business.” He gave the basketball another thump before grinning at me. “Unless it’s in the carnal sense.”
This time, I didn’t even try to hide my irritation. “You spend too much time with Brandon,” I muttered, and Ryan gave a bark of laughter.
“Right, because he knows what the word ‘carnal’ means. But please . . . don’t keep trying to fix us, Harper. We’re not broken.”
But the thing is, we felt broken. Really broken. And the scary thing was, I wasn’t sure how we’d even gotten here in only a month. I’d been so busy worried about saving David, saving Cotillion, saving myself, that I hadn’t noticed my relationship was also in need of a hero. Could I fix that, too?
Ryan kept thumping the basketball behind his bed and I watched him, my Cotillion dress crumpled and uncomfortable, and thought about the scariest question of alclass="underline" Did I want to?