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?
Chapter 34
WHEN I got to school the next morning, Bee was waiting for me in the parking lot. Leaning against her car, blond hair whipping in the wind, she frowned as I walked up to her. “You never texted me last night, and I called you like a hundred times.”
It took me a second to remember that I’d promised to text her, and why. Oh, right, the ugly scene at Cotillion practice. “Ugh, I’m sorry. I went over to Ryan’s last night, and I left my phone in the car.”
Bee pushed away from her car, tugging her knit hat a little farther down over her forehead. “Are you guys okay?”
The words “Of course!” immediately leapt to the tip of my tongue, but I bit them back. Bee deserved better than that. “We’re trying to be.”
Kids were walking past us and up the stairs into Wallace Hall. I caught a glimpse of Mary Beth’s reddish hair before she disappeared into the building. Bee must’ve seen her, too, because she paused on the steps. “Mary Beth had it totally wrong yesterday. You and Ryan are perfect together, and you know that.”
“Are we?” I heard myself ask, and Bee’s head jerked up like I’d smacked her.
“What?”
“It’s only . . .” I thought about last night, sitting in Ryan’s bedroom, me on the computer, him tossing his basketball, sitting four feet apart, but feeling like there was an ocean between us. “I love Ryan, but—”
“There are no buts,” Bee said, taking my hand. “You said it yourself. You love him.” She shrugged. “That’s all that matters.”
“You’re right,” I said, even though I wasn’t really sure that she was. And when she added, “Besides, you guys have to get married, and then Brandon and I will get married, and we’ll all live next door to each other, and our kids will play together . . .”
She was smiling, and when she bumped my hip with hers, I knew she wasn’t totally serious, but I couldn’t make myself smile back. I wasn’t an Oracle, but even I knew that future was . . . wrong.
Bee lowered her head. “You know, I was thinking last night. Don’t get me wrong, your lessons with Saylor are really awesome. I mean, the other day, when she taught you how to disarm someone with a knife? Even I wanted to learn that.”