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“How bad was it?” My voice was even, strong. None of the meekness or general sense of impending disaster that I felt to my core.
He shot me a bleak look.
“God,” I whispered.
We lapsed into silence again. I didn’t even know what to say. Ash had told me time and time again that telling his parents was a bad idea. That it was better to just be us, the way that we were. Even if that meant sneaking around and meeting in the park and having adventures that no one else could ever know about.
Except I wanted more than that. I wanted Sunday brunch after mass with his parents. I wanted weekends on the yacht. I wanted lazy afternoons in his entertainment center. I wanted everything with him, and I was only getting half.
Ash after dark.
That was what I called our relationship. I got the part of him that no one else ever saw. But I didn’t get the part of him that everyone else had.
He’d tossed his phone into the drink holder, and it lit up brightly every couple minutes.
“Is that them?” I asked.
“Yeah. I kind of just … left.”
“Fuck. They’re going to be worried.”
“Let them be,” he said vengefully.
“I don’t want them to blame me for this.”
He reached across the console and took my hand. “They won’t.”
But he didn’t know that.
Ash drove into the empty parking lot for the Savannah Yacht Center. His parents’ yacht was docked here. We’d taken it out on New Year’s when they were too busy with their own party. We’d snuck back out here a couple times since then. But nothing was as magical as being on the water when the fireworks burst overhead.
He killed the engine, and I followed him down the row of docks before stopping in front of his parents’. He helped me climb on board, and we ventured below deck.
Ash found a bottle of champagne in the wet bar. “Shall we?”
“You have to drive home,” I reminded him.
He drew me back into the bedroom. “What if we didn’t go back home?”
“My mom would freak out.”
“Your mom doesn’t get home until, like, six when she’s working over night. We could be back before then.”
I put my hand on the bottle. “Just talk to me.”
He set it down and took a seat on the edge of the bed. “They told me I wasn’t allowed to date.”
“Which you already knew.”
“Yeah. I told them it was bullshit and that I was going to take you to prom.” He ran a hand back through his hair. “That’s when it got rough.”
I took a seat next to him. “You can tell me.”
“You don’t want to hear it.”
“It’s okay, Ash.”
“They said that this was a phase and I’d get over it. That I was too good for you and someone like you only liked me for my money.”
I laughed in a self-deprecating manner. “Well, at least they got that out of their system.”
“It was terrible. I defended you. I told them you weren’t like that.”
“You don’t even have any money yet,” I said with a grin, nudging his shoulder.
He chuckled. “Thanks for that.”
“Look, it’s not anything I haven’t heard before. You don’t think the girls at school haven’t said every horrible thing imaginable to me? That I’m a poor scholarship student with no fashion. That I only caught you by opening my legs. That I must be some whore to keep you.”
“Who is saying that?” he demanded.
I put my hand on him again. “Honestly, it doesn’t matter. It hurts, but they don’t say it because of me. They say it because they’re projecting. I get messed up about it when it happens, but afterward, I know they only do it because they’re insecure. And your parents are only saying it because they think they’re protecting you. They think that keeping you from dating and keeping you from ‘someone like me’ will help you get further in life. They likely don’t want you to make the same mistakes they made.”
“That is very levelheaded, Lila,” he said calmly.
“I’ve had three years of this at school. My mom handles it with a calm demeanor.” I straightened and imitated my mom’s gentle but firm speech. “Girls in high school hurt people when they’re hurting. Give them grace.”
Ash relaxed a little more. “You sound just like her.”
“I have a dozen of them. But she always says the same thing. I can only be who and what I am, and I don’t want to be anyone else. And I don’t want to stoop to their level.”
“That’s all fine and well for the bitchy girls at school, but what the fuck am I supposed to do about my parents?”
I sighed and flopped back on the bed. “I don’t know, Ash. What do you want to do?”
“Move in with your mom?”
I giggled. “She’d adopt you in a heartbeat.”
