“Cat.”
Wow, since when was talking this nauseating? “Maybe I could sit.”
There aren’t any chairs outside. Faust realizes this, too, and makes the quietest noise of frustration. Then he strides to one of the tall, blocky cocktail tables, picks it up, and flips it on its side. He helps me onto my makeshift bench, standing sort of in front of me, kind of beside me. Mostly blocking the light from the door. If someone came outside, right now, they might think he was out here on his own.
I peer up at him, and the concern on his face makes my heart thump. “Thank you,” I whisper.
His jaw tics. Then he nods, his eyes shifting away. “What did he do to you?”
Anger trembles around the edges of his voice, and I press a hand over my chest to keep this stupid drumming quiet. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Then what was it like?” His fingers slip from his pants pocket and curl into a fist, one at a time, then uncurling. It reminds me of how a small, angry animal needs its entire body to breathe. “I’mnot…” He stops, and when I look up, I realize he caught me looking at his fist. He uncurls it for a final time. “I’m not going to do anything.”
But I want him to. I’ve been alone for so long, doing what I do, that Faust’s righteous anger on my behalf is hitting me like a drug. I want how much he cares. I want his unapologetic intelligence, his vigilant silence, his protection. I wanthim, and I’m scared. My heart is full. If Faust is here, taking up space, who is he pushing out?
“I’m—I told you.” I force the words out. “I’m dating him. He just asked me.”
His expression doesn’t change. “Okay.”
“I’m here for Bernard.”
“I know.”
“Not you.”
He inhales sharply. “I know.”
“So stop. You’re not going to save me. You’re not going to, to get inside my head. I don’t want to think about you anymore.” I stand, my hand still pressed protectively over my chest. “Please.”
The last word kicks something loose in me. I feel a tear run down my cheek, and it’s so deeply embarrassing, to be the woman at a party crying over a man. Because no one else sweeps in to help her like I do.
Faust watches me rub the tear away, his throat bobbing. His eyes shift between mine. Waiting. Then, not waiting.
“Cat,” he says in that low voice of his, thunder over a rolling hill, bouncing around the dips and getting caught in the grass. “Cat, I know.”
For a second, I just look at him looking at me. My emotions draining out from me like I’ve been uncorked. “Know… what?”
“I know what you’re doing.”
My stomach plummets. “I don’t know what you’re—”
“Arcadia.”
That’s all he has to say.
I cover my mouth, emptied out. Shocked.
My name.
He knows my name.
Faust watches my reaction carefully, like he’s been biding his time for this. But there isn’t any amusement on his face. This isn’t Gamemaster Faust, having fun with my head. “I looked at everything. Everything you’ve put online. Your followers. Accounts you’ve had before. Tagged photos,” he murmurs. And for as carefully restrained as his words are, there’s an undercurrent to his voice, too. A pulse there, thrumming, like a gas leak whistling in a bad made-for-TV movie, right before the house explodes. “I found one, from your friend Renata. Tagging you and your secret account. You were good. Really. Pulling your name-change petition from the internet. Ignoring those rumors so they got buried. I had to dig to find somewhere else you’d used the same username twice. But—Jesus, Cat, you forgot to delete your chess profile.”
My… chess profile. I haven’t logged on there in years. Since I moved, I’m sure. It’d have my old name on the account.
Faust looked through thirty thousand of my followers, all their photos, to find my one mistake?
Then he would’ve found more than just me and Renata. “Faust. Please. My family thinks the name change is a modeling thing, okay? And it was, sort of. So you can’t…” Momentarily, the last dregs of my self-preservation instinct debate slipping around him and running for the door. “Please don’t tell my family.”
