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Chapter fifteen
Leo
“AndsohowisPea getting on?” asked Edward.
“Fine,” said Leo.
“I was worried when she came home so suddenly. I spoke to her on the phone just after she got here, and she didn’t sound her usual self. A bad breakup or something?”
“Something like that.”
“I’m glad she came to you, anyway. I know you’ll look after her. You’ve always been as much of a brother to her as I have. Probably a better one, to be honest.”
Leo indulged in a brief but vivid fantasy of blowing his own brains out.
“You should get yourself shackled, Count,” said Edward, his eyes lingering on his girlfriend who stood a few metres away. “With the right woman, it’s just… Well. I’m no poet. But it’s really fucking incredible.”
“And what if the right woman is unobtainable?”
“To you? You’re a duke. What could possibly stand in your way?”
Leo shrugged as if his answer meant nothing at all. “Honour. Loyalty. Duty.”
“Who cares about any of that?”
“I do,” said Leo, glancing up just as Pea left the room. “You might.”
“Not me. I’m all about getting the girl, Count. True love’s kiss. There’s nothing else like it.”
Pea
Pea walked towards the downstairs cloakroom for something to do while she took a moment to gather the fracturing pieces of her heart.
It was final then. Leo really was going to carry on as though nothing had happened. And tomorrow she really would be gone. Because she wouldn’t beg. She had been the one to kiss him first, after all. She wouldn’t try to force him to feel more than he did. But staying here, around him, would send her mad.
She heard loud, laughing voices coming down the hallway and quickly side-stepped through an open door, not having the strength for light-hearted conversation.
The voices belonged to two girls Pea barely knew, but as they passed her hiding place, she overheard their mocking conversation.
“And did you see her hair? The rumours are true. She’s positively wild.”
“Has she never heard of product? Of straighteners?”
“Just a blow-dry would do. And no make-up, her nails atotalmess—”
“They say she never wears shoes. Imagine her feet.”
“Ew!”
“How can her brother be so hot and she’s just so…not.”
Another burst of loud laughter and then they were too far for Pea to hear.
She stood completely still for a while, a sort of hot, rushing feeling in her head, a burning feeling in her eyes. But it wasn’t as though it was the first time she’d overheard such comments. School had been…difficult.
She didn’t care. She really didn’t care. Soon she would be on a plane, heading somewhere new, able to drown her mind in new sights and impressions, in new ideas and feelings. And she would turn it into art, and then it didn’t matter that often she felt quite small and drab and silly and overlooked. Because people would look at her pictures and not her, and she could move on and on and on to another new place and another, where no one knew her.
She would go to places bright and strange that were a million miles from the soft brown hills and ancient waters of the English Lakes. She would go, and Leo would stay, and maybe, eventually, things might go back to how they were before. Maybe, eventually, she would meet him at a party or her brother’s house and be able to smile or even tease, and she wouldn’t remember the feel of him or the scent or the taste, and her heart might never be whole again, but maybe it would eventually stop breaking.
