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Chapter FifteenSadieRiding the cab with Fiona on the way to the airport, I feel like a different person from the woman who drove away from it only a couple of days ago.
That timeframe sucker-punches me every time I think of it.
Only a couple of days.
I watch the snow-heavy landscape drift by, the clouds parting to shaft down powerful beams of sunlight that turn the world into the inside of a crystal ball.
I try to fit it into my mind that so much emotional transformation can happen inside of a person in such a short space of time. And yet the logic if it continues to dance away from me, always just beyond my grasp.
All I can do is look to my heart, my womb, all the thousand flurries inside of me that tell me this is right.
Every time he says he’s claiming me, a chorus rises inside of me, a chorus that screams, I want to be claimed, I need to be claimed.
“Sadie?” Fiona says, calling me from my reverie.
“Sorry,” I murmur. “I was miles away.”
“I could tell,” she smiles, looking at me closely. “If you don’t want me to go on this trip, you know all you’ve gotta do is say, right? I’ll jump out of this car and carry us both home if I have to.”
“That seems a little dramatic,” I laugh. “I’m fine, really.”
I’m more than fine, that’s the truth.
I’m experiencing the greatest awakening of my life.
With my best friend’s dad.
I find I can’t hold Fiona’s gaze for long, the deceit of what we’re doing too powerful when we’re so close, physically, and emotionally. I want to blurt out the truth right here, but a roadblock rises inside of me, hammering that idea into a crumpled ball of impossibility.
“Goldilocks,” Fiona murmurs a moment later. “You know I’ll never judge you, don’t you? If you ever wanted to talk to me about anything …”
I force myself to look at her again, even as my gaze tries to focus on the passing trees behind her, the inside of the car, anything so I don’t have to feel as though she’s pinning me with a laser of guilt.
“I know that,” I say.
Does she know?
I remember how she behaved earlier when Saul revealed the writer’s convention tickets, and the same suspicion comes to me.
“Never,” she says firmly, holding my gaze.
“I know,” I repeat, laughing a little now.
She looks at me a beat longer, opens her mouth then closes it again. A look passes across her face as though she’s deciding to leave something unvoiced.
A daring hope flourishes through me. Perhaps she does know and she’s giving me time to work up to telling her in my own way. Perhaps she doesn’t resent me and her father being together at all.
Or perhaps – and this is just as likely – this is unrelated and I’m just populating my consciousness with hopes so I don’t have to give in to the gnawing guilt.
Two halves of me war, one half an excited woman ready to go on her first proper date, the other a glaring witch-eyed betrayer who knows that I’m possibly doing my friend the worst harm of her life.
“Well,” she says eventually, turning to her window, “don’t go getting any ideas about us not being best friends anymore. Even if I meet a hundred cool writers at this convention, they’ll never beat Goldilocks.”
“That means a lot to me,” I say honestly.
“We’ve been through too much to let the little things get in the way, haven’t we?”
“Jeez,” I say, laughing to try and diffuse some of the tension. “You’d think you were riding off to war or something, Fi. Why so glum?”
You know why. She knows why.
“Well, you know, the best writers are emotionally tortured, right? Maybe I’m just getting into character.”
Is that what we are now, I wonder, just two characters to each other, hiding what we really know because facing it would be too cataclysmic?
I find myself thinking of mine and Saul’s bet, or fake bet, or excuse or whatever the heck we’re calling it. I try to convince myself that on the date we’ll find out that we’re not compatible at all and then this whole improbable edifice will come tumbling down.
Yeah, right.
And maybe I’ll sprout wings and fly alongside Fiona’s plane.I walk up to the mansion, the large almost-Gothic building glittering like a beacon. Beads of snow sway and dance in the light wind. Jasper sits on the front porch, head tilted at me, tongue hanging out to catch the snowflakes.
“Hey, boy,” I say, leaning down and ruffling him behind the ears. “How’re you doing, huh?”
He grins and then his lips split into a yawn, making the cutest high-pitched noise I never would have expected from a dog his size.
“Aww, aren’t you just the sweetest?” I gush. “How’d you feel if I just scooped you up and carried you away, huh? Do you think Saul and Fiona would mine?”
