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By the time we got to high school, the guys and I felt more like genuine friends. I’d accepted the five of them would always be closer to each other than they would be with me. It was inevitable, them all having grown up together since the damn cradle. I’d grown into my lanky frame a little, and I even dated here and there.
It was after Dad landed the contract with NASA and I was feeling more secure than ever that I finally got up the nerve to talk to her. Bellamy. The goddess I’d worshipped from afar for five years. She sat at the table with us every single day and never said a word to me. To be fair, I never talked to her either.
But this was my time.
She’d just gone on at length the week before about breaking up with her most recent boyfriend. And prom was three weeks away.
It was now or never.
After the bell rang signaling the end of lunch, I left my tray on the table and hurried around to intersect Bellamy before she could escape to her next class. “Hey, Bellamy,” I said, then swallowed hard. Jesus, why was my voice suddenly so dry? I could hear my heart pounding in my ears.
She stopped, frowning at me in her path and pulling out her phone to check her texts.
“Wannagotothedance?”
“Huh?” She looked up at me from her phone.
I coughed a little, clearing my throat. “The dance. Um. Prom. Wanna go? With, um… me?”
She turned her head, looking around us, eyes wide. Several people were watching on. Shit. I hadn’t intended on having an audience. This was just where I knew I could catch her every day.
I opened my mouth to say something else, maybe to apologize for asking her like this, or to tell her how long I’d liked her and that I’d like to get to know her better. That I saw her. How, yes, most of the time she was smiling and putting on such a great show for everyone, but I saw how sometimes she looked sad and lost when she didn’t think anyone was looking.
I wanted to tell her that I got that, that I felt like that too sometimes. Yeah, my dad was super successful, but I barely knew him, because he was gone so often.
But whatever I might have said was cut off by her caustic laugh once her eyes finally came back to me.
“Go to the prom? With you?” She said it so loud that people who hadn’t been stopping to look before did now. Like they did at car crashes.
And that was what it felt like. Her words hit me like a semi-truck as her beautiful features turned cruel. I wish I could say she was ugly in that moment, but no; even as she cut me into pieces, she was gorgeous.
“My grandmother was best friends with the Rockefellers.” She snorted, then pointed behind me. “You know they only put up with you because of your rich daddy, right? You aren’t a blueblood.”
“Jesus, you don’t have to be a bitch, Bellamy,” Montgomery said from behind me, and I felt my face go red from my friend having to defend me.
Bellamy only shifted and shrugged. “Sorry if I’m the only one who will tell it like it really is.” Then she turned and flounced away from us, all like she hadn’t just dug a knife right in the center of my chest.
“High school was a long time ago,” she said, bringing me back to the present. “I don’t live in the past. The girl I was then is most certainly not the woman I am now. Just as I hope the boy you were, sitting in the lunchroom and gawking at me every day, is not the man sitting across from me now. And as for my life now… if I remember correctly, you were at the exact same Darlington socials surrounded by women who wanted you to be their sugar daddy. So don’t sit and judge me, unless you can do the same to yourself. We both play the game, Emmett. It’s Darlington. It’s who and what we are.”
After high school, I left for college, determined to become my own man. No one would ever look down on me the way she had that day. They could try, but I learned my own worth and place in the world while I was away. And then I came back to Darlington to claim the place that was deservedly mine.
My palm itched to smack that pantiless ass of hers to show her exactly the man I’d grown to be. Fortunately for Bellamy, Mrs. H entered with our breakfast.
As if Mrs. H could sense the tension in the room, she quickly served the meal and then walked over to an armoire, pulled out a white box with a black ribbon, and placed it on the table in front of Bellamy. “It’s for tonight’s Trial. Every night before a Trial, you will get a box with what you are both to wear” was all she said before leaving us.
