Chapter Twenty-Seven
Emmett
My phone buzzed and I looked down at the message. It was from Bryn. Maybe an apology for the crazy way she had been acting, as if the last few weeks had never happened?
I read the text.
I stared at the words. I narrowed my eyes and reread the message. Was this some kind of a joke?
I thought back to the last email she sent me, two days ago. Raw and honest and amazing. Something wasn’t connecting. Then Bryn texted me again.
I waited. A new message popped up.
I didn’t have to finish reading to know what it said.
Maybe, in a way, I had known all along.
I sat on the edge of my bed for a second, frozen, but then adrenaline pushed through my veins. I bolted out of my chair and stomped down the stairs.
I swung the front door open and forgot to grab my coat, but my anger kept me warm, like a tight insulation of heat. I ran toward CeCe’s apartment. Part of my brain told me to calm down first, but I had too much forward momentum to stop. The cold air didn’t cool my mind. My breaths blew out steam like exhaust, like my insides were on fire.
My pace turned into a full-out sprint. I played back the last couple of months in my head. I felt my mind untwisting. It all made sense now. Those emails. Those words.
My heart rapped against my chest.
Who was the fool? Bryn? Me?
I ran up the stairs to her front porch and before I knocked, I stalled. CeCe was clever. Would she deny all of this? Would she lie her way out of it? I had to play this right. I had to catch her in her own trap. I looked down at my phone and opened up the last email that she sent me, two days ago.
I curled my hand into a fist and pounded on the door. A second later, a girl answered that I didn’t recognize. How many girls lived in this place? She must have sensed my confusion or maybe I just looked irrationally angry.
“I’m Kelsey,” she said.
“I need to talk to CeCe,” I said.
She backed up a step and let me in the house. I walked inside and the living room suddenly felt charged with a heated energy. I heard footsteps on the stairs and I looked up when I saw CeCe. I stared at her, trying to wrap my mind around the emails we had exchanged over the last few months. Her mind was behind all of them. Her heart.
She cautiously met my eyes. I had my game face on—intense stare, no smile, hiding any hint of emotion. I had perfected this glare. Even now, with heated anger swarming my head, I could play it cool. I crossed my arms over my chest. My presence probably had all the warm greeting of an interrogation.
CeCe stood quietly at the bottom of the stairs like an actor with stage fright who hadn’t rehearsed her lines.
Kelsey looked between us, sensing we needed privacy.
“Um, I have to run out,” she said and excused herself. She grabbed her winter jacket off the hook on the wall and shut the front door.
We stood there silently for a minute. The radiator hummed next to the window. CeCe looked over at the Christmas tree and back at me.
“So, what’s up?” she asked.
Her question infuriated me. I handed her my phone. It was game time.
“Bryn sent me this email a few days ago.”
CeCe’s eyes narrowed. Her hands stayed at her sides. I might have smiled at her hesitation if I wasn’t so furious. She knew exactly what it said. She didn’t need to be reminded. They were her words.
She shook her head.
“It’s none of my business,” she said.
“Read it,” I insisted, and pushed the phone toward her. She took it out of my hand and looked at the screen. She paced across the living room and read it out loud.
“I try not to write to you. I try not to think about you. But it’s like trying not to wake up.”
I stared at her while she read. That voice. More pieces were fitting together.
“You are something to look forward to, like seasons, like a change from a life that’s black and white to a world budding with color. How can I not write you? What the alphabet is to writing, what notes are to music, what numerals are to math, you are to me. Essential.”
She stared down at the words, words she couldn’t delete, couldn’t take back. Guilt flooded her face. She looked up at me.
“Well?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. “What do you think?”
I watched her carefully.
She looked down at her own writing. “It’s…it’s okay,” she sputtered helplessly. She could accurately estimate the power needed to send a space craft to the moon and back. But she couldn’t explain herself out of this. She was caught in a trap, her leg hooked. The cage door slammed shut.
I waited, enjoying watching her struggle. She started pacing around the room again, and I followed her. I wasn’t letting her escape.
“Um,” she stalled, and looked back down at the writing like she was critiquing it. “I might have changed the first sentence.” She pointed to the screen and I caught up to her. We stood in the center of the room. The heat from her skin waved toward me.
Time to really lay it on.
“I got a text from Bryn this morning.” I grabbed my phone and opened the text messages. “Read it.”
She knew better than to argue. She took the phone from my hand and read the text out loud.
She stared at the phone with disbelief, but then her eyes widened, like she was piecing a riddle together.
“What? I don’t believe this.” She looked up at me. “Well, she could have at least told you that—”
“There’s more,” I said. I circled my finger in the air, gesturing for her to keep reading. She scrolled down.
I watched her carefully, reading her as she read my message. She cleared her throat and continued.
She paused, like her words were suddenly caught behind her teeth. She continued reading the text, but it took effort, like she had to force the words out of her mouth.
CeCe looked down at the phone, like a thief caught in the act of a robbery. Only she hadn’t been robbing material things. She had been robbing feelings and emotions. All my anger was resurfacing, like water hitting the boiling point.
She handed the phone back to me and I shoved it in my pocket.
“Is it true?” I asked. My hands clenched into fists.
“I—”
“You know, if you two were going to fuck with me, you could have at least organized your messages a little better,” I said, my voice sharp.
She lifted her shoulders and helplessly tried to piece words together.
“All those emails? You wrote them?” I asked.
She nodded slowly.
“Yes.”
I rubbed my fingers over my forehead. “What about the texts? Were those from you, too?”
“Probably, most of them.” She nodded.
So that was it. This had all been CeCe. Nothing had been real. It was all a fucking joke. It hurt. It hurt knowing my favorite part of Bryn, all along, had been her. But it was more than that. Our emails together had been the best part of this year. They helped me to start over. They made me happy for the first time since my dad died. CeCe had helped me to move on, to reclaim my life. All along, she had been my muse.
I started pacing around the room seeing nothing and everything.
“You used Bryn,” I said.
“She asked me to do it,” CeCe argued. “She was trying to break the ice with you.”
“Break the ice?” I yelled. “Why did you agree to help her?”
“I thought it would just be this one time, this one text. You made her nervous.”
“And then?” I asked.
“Then…then,” she faltered. “I just got carried away.”
I glared at her. “So, what was I? Your little creative writing project?”
The hardness in CeCe’s eyes melted. She stared down at the ground. “That’s not what I was doing.”
I pulled my hands through my hair. “I was falling for Bryn and this whole time, it’s been you. And it was all a lie!” I shouted.
CeCe looked up, returning my glare, as if she had the right to be mad right now. She took a step closer to me. “You think you’re so great at reading people. You could have figured it out. All it takes is five minutes talking to Bryn to know she couldn’t have put together two of the words I messaged you,” she said.
“So this is my fault?” I shouted back. I took a step closer until we were inches apart. Her chest rose and fell with deep breaths.
“You wanted to believe it,” she said. “You wanted it all, the perfect brains and the perfect face and the perfect body all rolled up into the perfect girl.” There was fire behind her eyes, the kind of passion I was looking for from Bryn all along. The passion that always fell short. I was always looking at the wrong face.
“You don’t know what I wanted.”
I started pacing now. My mind was on fire. Heat soared through my chest. There was something else I was piecing together.
I turned and glared at her. “That night, under the balcony, that was you talking, wasn’t it?”
She stared down at her feet and nodded slowly. “Yes,” she admitted.
“God, you seduced me,” I said. “I almost slept with Bryn that night!”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “I know, I was there. Not the almost sleeping with you part.”
“Well, you might as well have been.”
“Well, I sure as hell wasn’t.”
“But it wasn’t her. It was what she said, what you said that made me—” I stopped and my voice trailed off. I couldn’t make sense of what I was feeling. “I can’t talk about this right now. I can’t think.” I couldn’t look at her. I threw my arm out, pointing at the door. “Get out of here, CeCe!”
She nodded and headed to the door until she turned back.
She pointed at the front door. “You need to get out,” she said.
I couldn’t take this. “Damn it, CeCe. I’m not joking with you right now. Leave!”
“You’re in my house!” she shouted back.
I blinked and looked around, momentarily forgetting where I was. I shook my head and barreled past her. I might have bulldozed into her if she hadn’t jumped out of my path of destruction. I slammed the door shut behind me.
…
CeCe
When Tuba came home, I nearly tripped running down the stairs to meet her. She threw her gym bag on the floor and looked up at me. I came around the railing so fast we almost collided.
“He knows!”
I expected dark piano notes to follow my statement. I was infuriated to see Tuba smile, like this was positive news.
“He found out about me and Bryn!” My voice was almost hysterical. “He came over and confronted me about it.”
“Good.” She set both of her hands on my shoulders to steady me. “It’s out now. So, you guys can finally come to terms with the fact that you’re mutually in love with each other.”
Her words hit the stubborn armor around my mind and bounced back.
“I think we can come to terms with the fact that he hates me and thinks I’m a compulsive liar,” I said.
“Oh, give him some time.” She walked around the side of the couch and sat down. “He’ll come to his senses. He just needs to process it. Guys are emotionally stupid.”
I followed her and sat down on the other end of the couch.
“Process what?”
“The fact that he’s in love with you, not Bryn. He’ll get there.” She picked up a magazine off the coffee table and opened it, thumbing through the glossy pages.
I couldn’t believe how calm she sounded. Didn’t she see the problem here?
“Nothing is going to happen, Tuba. It’s over. That’s all there is to process.”
She looked up at me.
“Well, it is with that kind of a defeatist attitude.”
“It can’t work,” I argued. “Look at him. And look at me. He should be dating a supermodel. Someone like Bryn that can hang on his arm at red carpet parties and social galas and look great in front of a camera. Someone beautiful.”
She closed her magazine and set it down.
“You don’t think Emmett can see you as beautiful?”
I sighed and sank back into the couch cushions.
I felt my face heat up. My nose started to tingle, the tell-tale sign that tears were coming. I blinked hard, trying to contain the buzzing ache behind my eyes. Life, this would be an opportune time to drop a meteor from the sky. Right on my head. I waited for another second, willing the asteroid to hit. No such luck.
“You’re scared,” Tuba said. “You’re terrified because you’ve never felt this way about anyone, and it’s freaking you out.”
I bit my lips together to stop them from trembling. She was right, but there was so much more to it. I choked back the urge to sob.
“You can’t relate to this,” I said.
Tuba shook her head. “Everybody has insecurities, CeCe. You’re not the only one who’s self-conscious, you know that?”
I shook my head. “You don’t have to wear your flaws on your face. People judge me the second they see me.”
“Everybody is judged,” Tuba said.
I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my shirt.
“Do you know how hard it is to be over six feet tall in high school?” Tuba asked. “I swear, every guy I like is five inches shorter than me. Guys tease me all the time. I walk around, staring at short girls and wish I could be small and petite and cute, not this fucking giant. This athlete. This jock. Sure, it helps you get a college scholarship, but who cares when you never get asked out. Guys call me Amazon. Or Sasquatch. Not exactly compliments.”
I looked over at Tuba. I had never seen her height as an obstacle. I saw it as something that made her stand out, something unique and strong. It was her defining characteristic.
“Remember last week, Mac asked out a guy in one of her classes, and he told her he didn’t want to date a girl who had bigger muscles than he did? How do you think that made her feel when she looked in the mirror?”
I swallowed and felt terrible, but also, surprisingly, I felt relieved to hear that other people had insecurities. That I wasn’t alone.
“Remember VanBree, and that hot soccer player she liked freshman year who was in love with her?” Tuba asked.
I nodded. Richie Stocker. He was beautiful. Green eyes, freckles, strawberry blonde hair. A lazy California accent.
“She was crazy about him. But he was shorter than her. So she didn’t pursue it. And another girl swooped right in and grabbed him. VanBree’s been jealous ever since because the only damn reason she didn’t go out with him is she was worried what other people would say. She was worried they didn’t match. But that’s such bullshit. If you go through life caring what everybody else thinks, you’re just going to be miserable. All that matters is what you think. And what Emmett thinks. That’s it.”
I felt myself nodding along. Our own eyes were our worst critics. Our own thoughts were the world’s harshest judges.
“Your scar doesn’t define you, CeCe. Unless you let it,” Tuba said. “So don’t.”
She was right. That had been my problem all along.
“So, Emmett understands right?” Tuba asked.
I lifted my shoulder. “He was a little too pissed off to reason with,” I said.
“You mean you didn’t tell him? You didn’t tell him how you really feel?”
I looked away, toward the tree lights.
“Damn it, CeCe, he deserves to know. Hell, you deserve it. You have to tell him. Remember all that talk about a grand gesture? Well, I think it’s your move.”