He gave a quiet, disappointed curse. “How’d you know it was me?” He sounded normal—lazy, slightly pouty, and low. “Did Pebble Brain already text you? Lydia said you said he hadn’t asked for your—wait.Wait.” A smile creptinto his voice. “Do you still have my number saved on your phone?”
My eyes bounced around my room, as if something in here would give me a good lie. Nothing. “You and Lydia gossip about my love life now?” In, like, thehourthat I’d last seen her, she’d immediately called Beck?
“Is that how you knew it was me?” Beck went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Because you still have my number from before?”
I’d gotten my first phone two months before starting high school—our parents’ birthday present to Jamie and me. I’d brought it to an event at Alderton-Du Ponte, and the first person whose number I’d asked for was Beck’s.
“I don’t know why you sound so smug about it,” I grumbled, biting down on the corner of my lip. “I just never got around to deleting it.”
“Right, right. Because after everything that happened, I was the last thing on your mind, huh?”
I said nothing, not trusting myself to speak.
“Be honest,” Beck went on, voice back to its languid tenor. I pictured him in a chair, tipping his head back, staring at the ceiling. His bleached hair, since it was so long, would hang in jagged edges toward the floor. “Would you have known it was me if you didn’t have my contact saved? Because I thought I did a pretty good job of channeling the dorkiness?—”
“Why is this such a joke to you?” I almost whispered, the unease coiled so tightly in my chest that I was afraid it’d crawl up my throat. “Why can’t you just leave me be?”
“Because I’m bored.”
I waited, but he didn’t go on. “You’re messing with my life because you’rebored?”
“Yeah.”
The one word was flat. Unaffected.Bored. My breathing started coming heavier, but I couldn’t pinpoint what emotion fueled me. Disbelief? Rage? Something else? “Can we be adults about this and?—”
“I can be an adult about it,” Beck answered before I could finish. “You can’t. You’re only seventeen.”
“I turn eighteen on the sixth?—”
“Well, then our adult conversation can wait until then.” Something shifted on the other end of the phone. “You’re letting Pebble Brain shoot his shot. Why can’t I?”
There was humor in his voice. It raked across my skin like fire. “Because you’reyou.”
Beck inhaled through his teeth. “You wound me, Nell.”
“Because you don’t mean it.” I clutched the phone tighter, almost as if it were a lifeline in the insane conversation. “You’re only flirting because you’re trying to mess with me.”
“What if I did mean it?” Beck’s voice was a croon now, as delicate and soft as a confession itself. Gentle enough to trick my body into shivering, especially since those words were right into my ear. “Hm? What if then?”
C-R-U-E-L. It was cruel of him to ask. To pretend. I thought about the way his eyes had dropped earlier in the café, going from scanning my gaze to gazing at my lips.When you want someone, you’ll look at their mouth. You’ll imagine kissing them. You won’t be able to help it.
“You won’t,” I got out. Swallowed. My throat tightened. “So do us both a favor and butt out, would you? Your life may be a joke to you, but mine isn’t to me.”
Silence followed my harsh words, long enough that I would’ve thought Beck had hung up if it hadn’t been for the roar of white noise. When he spoke again, this time, his voice barely cut through the static in my ears. “You wound me, Nell.”
“You’ll get over it,” I said, and pulled my phone down from my ear. Without wasting another second, I ended the call, pressing the screen flat into my covers as if I could suffocate what’d just happened into the duvet.
I pressed my fingers to my lips hard. Thoughts were tripping over themselves in my mind, but Beck’s voice overshadowed them all.After everything that happened, I was the last thing on your mind.
U-N-T-R-U-E.The letters did nothing for me.
U-N-F-O-R-G-E-T-T-A-B-L-E.
The problem was that I deserved this. I deserved Beck trying to make a joke out of my life. I deserved it—all because of the one time I’d slipped up.
All because of the last time I’d been with Beckham Jennings in the serenity garden.
When I was little, I’d looked forward to every Alderton-Du Ponte event, only so I could see Beck. We’d play chess out in the garden, or we’d sit and look at the stars, or he’d listen to me ramble and ramble, because I was good at it. But we’d only ever interact in the garden—a little corner of sanctuary for us. He’d ignore me within the walls of the club, but in the garden, it was like it’d been only the two ofus in the world.
