My next move was defensive, a small pawn shifting forward one space—stalling.
“You do.” His voice was amused. “I can see that you do.”
“You said you hadn’t been crying.” I barely registered my fingers brushing a pawn forward—automatic, meaningless.
“You saw, though. I know you did.” Beck countered instantly, cutting off my path. My king had fewer and fewer options for protection. “You must’ve thought I was pathetic, a fifteen-year-old boy out crying in a garden.”
No. That hadn’t been how I’d felt at all. The sight of the tear tracks on his cheeks had jolted me, but not because I thought he was pathetic—but because Becknevercried. And I’d never even pried about what had been bothering him. I’d just swooped in, lit a few flowers on fire, and pinned the blame squarely on his back.
Beck’s eyes bounced between mine, reading my thoughts as if he could hear them aloud. They must’ve been written all over my face, loud, bold letters.R-E-G-R-E-T.
“I’d been crying because I’d been wishing things were different,” he went on in the same flippant vein. “That my parents liked me, and my only friends weren’t my alcoholic aunt and a pretty girl I only saw once a month. Perhaps you’re right, though. Perhaps I really did bring it upon myself.”
Emotion crawled up my throat, feeling like I was about to be sick.You should’ve asked, I told myself with quiet despair.You should’ve made him talk to you. You should’ve known he’d been lying. “You should’ve been honest.” Regret choked me, but the words were out there.
“I knew you would say that,” he murmured. Beck slid his final piece into place. My king had nowhere left to move, not without stepping into a space he could take. The board belonged entirely to him. “Almost down to the letter. See? I do know you well, Nell-Bell.”
And then, mockingly, he whispered, “Checkmate.”
I slowly lifted my gaze from the board, once more taking him all in. His hood had fallen lower on the back of his head, and he’d pushed some of his hair behind his ear, as well as he could manage, though some of the few locks nearer to his temple escaped. The darkness of his roots looked beautiful, threaded through the blond, almost as if it’d been intentionally dyed that way. Beck wasn’t cover-of-a-magazine pretty like Carter, butpaintingpretty, with sharp cheekbones and an even sharper nose. His lashes were impossibly long, fluttering with each blink. Sculpture-like. Unreal. Cold.
Underneath, like it was obscured by a nearly opaque layer of paint, I could see the boy from the garden. Quiet, calm, but sharp when he lashed out. Not one to laugh often, but when he did, it was a soft sound that reverberated behind my ribs. I could recite Beck from memory, spell him like a word I knew by heart.B-E-C-K-H-A-M J-E-N-N-I-N-G-S.
But so much of him, he kept to himself. Back then, I’d known his relationship with his parents was strained, but he’d never given me specifics. He’d never told me he had no friends. He’d barely told me anything at all.
A boy I’d had a crush on, one I never thought to push deeper than what he’d alwaysoffered me.
I swallowed hard, resting my foot against the table leg beneath the chessboard. Beck’s eyelashes fluttered. “I shouldn’t have done what I did,” I said, and the words were like admitting defeat.
“Which part?” Beck tipped his head. “Kissing me in the garden, or telling our parents that I was the one who destroyed it?”
I blinked the memory away. “Both.”
“Both.” Beck echoed it distantly. His voice was low when he spoke next, and for the first time, I could hear the undercurrent of resentment in it. “You threw me away.”
What happened next happened in a blur. The rosebush had burned brighter, and then suddenly Mrs. Johnson had been there, wielding a fire extinguisher she’d seemed to have plucked up out of nowhere. After she doused the flames, she marched over to me and wrenched me away from Beck.I thought you were better than your sister.
I matched his stare now. “I did.”
“You threw me under the bus like I meant nothing. Like everyone else.”
“Beck was the one who’d destroyed the garden,” Mrs. Johnson had claimed while I’d cried. My parents had been there then, looking down at me with disappointment at first, a look they’d only ever given Destelle. But as Mrs. Johnson spoke, the expression faded into something else. Something more manageable.Sympathy. “Beck started the fire, too. Look, he has a lighter in his hand!”
“So this is my punishment?” I asked Beck now, and despite how sick to my stomach I felt, I didn’t even blink. Iwondered if I looked steady on the outside, or like I was barely holding it together. The latter was the truth. “Following me around, trying to ruin things with Carter. That’s why you’re trying to sabotage me? Because I hurt your feelings?”
Darkness lived in Beck’s gaze, and before, I’d thought his eyes had remained the same. I realized then that theyhadchanged, and were the biggest change in Beckham Jennings. Consistent in color, worlds different in depth. It was more than just resentment. In that moment, Beck looked at me like he hated me.
“No. I told you.” At odds with his expression, his voice was serene. “It’s because I’m bored.”
And then Beck moved.
Not a chess piece, but his foot. The table leg I’d been resting against hadn’t been the table at all, but Beck’s leg stretched out underneath the chessboard.
He moved. Slowly. Deliberately. He brushed the bare skin of my ankle, the edge of his jeans rough against my calf. My breath caught in my throat, and I should’ve pulled back, but I didn’t. Couldn’t. I was frozen solid, under his stare and his touch.
My heartbeat ticked up in my chest. I frantically fought for words to spell, but I only had one name.B-E-C-K-H-A-M J-E-N-N-I-N-G-S.
Beck kept going, the touch of his leg tracing higher on mine, the contact featherlight but searing. Goosebumps rose in the path he drew. He slid his leg up to nearly my knee before moving it lower, crawling back down the same path he’d just gone up, all while never looking away.
