Page 32 of Trust Fund Baby

My heart thudded so loud I swore it echoed off the water. “That I wanted us to be together. For real. Not just stolen moments behind closed doors or on my sailboat in the middle of the night. I didn’t want to hide it anymore. Or pretend we were only friends.”

Roxie went still. Her breath caught like she hadn’t expected that—hadn’t let herself imagine that might’ve been what I had been planning all along.

“I had this whole ridiculous speech,” I admitted, rubbing the back of my neck. “About how we’d figure it out when school started. When we’d travel to visit each other. That I didn’t care if our parents thought we were too young, or what your grandfather might try to control. I just wanted you.”

Her mouth parted slightly. Her eyes glassy now, reflecting more than just the moonlight. “You were going to tell me that?”

I nodded, slowly. “Yeah.”

She stared at me for a long moment and then looked away. “I waited for you. At that party. I searched every damn room. I thought maybe you’d gone off to sit down by the ocean even. But when I couldn’t find you, I just assumed you’d found some girl you’d decided to have some fun with instead. Ironic, really.”

“Roxie, there were never any other girls except you,” I said quietly. Despite how I may have made it look to everyone else, there had only ever been Roxanne King for me. Everyone else had been a means to an end to fill the hole in my heart that had always been in the shape of her.

A beat of silence passed. The only sound was the water lapping against the sides of the pool and the distant crash of waves from the Atlantic Ocean.

“Then why?” Her voice broke this time. “Why go to my grandfather? Why tell him that I was going to NYU instead of Harvard? You knew what he would do with my trust fund. You knew I just needed to get to my eighteenth birthday, and it wouldn’t matter that I wasn’t following ‘King Tradition’.”

I looked down at my beer bottle again, ashamed. “Because I was hurt. And I wanted to hurt you, too.”

12

Roxie

Because I wanted to hurt you, too.

The words sharp and cold hung in the air between us. It was hard to remember a moment when Sebastian had been so candid and truthful with me, and without any exaggeration. And he wasn’t done.

“I was seventeen, stupid and angry. I saw what I thought I saw, and it broke something in me. I didn’t stop to ask questions. I didn’t give you the chance to explain. I just wanted you to feel as betrayed as I did.”

My legs were stiff as I slowly got up from the chair, took a few steps away from him, and then turned to look at the house. I wrapped my arms around myself as I considered his words. My black dress swayed in the warm breeze.

After all these years of never understanding what had happened between us, and this was the truth. It almost felt impossible to grapple with.

Ridiculous, even, that something so stupid had ruined years of friendship.

My mouth started moving before I could stop it. I so badly wanted him to understand how irrevocably he’d changed my life back then.

“You could have said something to me,” I told him, my voice aching. “Didn’t I deserve that?”

“By the time that I cooled off enough to realize that I should have talked to you about it, you were gone.” Sebastian gave me a sheepish look as if it had been just yesterday he’d thrown me to the wolves—I mean, my grandfather. “You disappeared into the city. It was like New York had swallowed you whole. Plus, I didn’t think you’d want me to reach out.”

“I lost everything that year,” I whispered. “NYU was the only thing I had left after he cut me off. And I worked my ass off to stay in the city, with no backup plan and no one to call when rent was late. Finding Hallie was my saving grace.”

I didn’t expect Sebastian to respond. Part of me hoped he wouldn’t. If he said one more thing that made me feel something—anything—I might not be able to hold myself together. Not after years of trying to build walls thick enough to keep all of this, all of him, in the past.

I heard him stand up behind me, the soft scrape of the lounge chair shifting on the stone patio. His footsteps were slow, tentative, before they stopped a few feet away.

“I didn’t know,” he said, his voice breaking slightly on the last word.

It was exactly the opposite of what I’d hoped he’d say.

“No,” I spat, venom coloring my words as I spun to face him. “You didn’t want to know. You wanted revenge. You wanted to hurt me. And congratulations, Sebastian. You got exactly what you wanted.”

I was getting angrier with every second that passed. I needed to understand everything if I was ever going to make sense of everything he’d done. “Why are you telling me this now?”

He looked me straight in the eyes and I knew he was going to be honest with me before he’d even started speaking. “Because I saw this as a second chance. Fate brought us back together and I wanted to make amends. I knew I’d missed having you in my life, but I didn’t realize how much until I saw you that night in the bar.”

“What makes you think I want to make amends?” It felt good to spit the words back at him. To feel like I had some power over him after what he’d done.