Chapter 36

Chapter 36

Ellis spotted me first. Garrett was too occupied with kissing the bare skin below Ellis’s undone collar.

I stumbled backward, feet slipping in the wet sand. “Sorry, excuse me, I’ll—”

Garrett turned too.

“Shit,” he said. The first time I’d ever heard him swear.

“I’ll go,” I said.

“No.” Ellis pulled away, tucking in the tails of his shirt. “I’ll go. You two need to talk.” He shot Garrett a look. “Clearly.”

He strode back toward the hotel, leaving Garrett and me alone on the beach.

I had no idea what to say. Realizing Garrett was into guys wasn’t such a shock. It explained a lot, actually. Realizing what a good liar he was, though? That threw me.

“So.” I glanced after Ellis, now nothing but a gangly shadow against the distant glow of the party lights. “You and Ellis Dean.”

“Listen, Kat.” Garrett swallowed. “It’s not what it—”

“I’m not going to tell anyone. If that’s what you’re worried about.”

He sighed, shoulders slumping. “Thank you.”

“I am curious why you never told me, though. This whole time I thought I just wasn’t your type.”

I smiled, trying to make a joke of it. But Garrett took my hand and gazed into my eyes, deadly sincere.

“I wish you were my type, Kat. I can’t tell you how much.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to me,” I told him. “I hope you know that.”

In some ways, it made things a hell of a lot easier. If only I’d known back when Heath and I were together; all of that jealousy over Garrett’s intentions toward me, when in reality there was nothing to worry about.

“Who else knows?” I asked.

“No one.”

“Not even—”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Bella wouldn’t have cared. Sheila, I wasn’t so sure about. She wasn’t homophobic. She and Kirk had remained close since their retirement, and she’d done plenty of fundraising for AIDS patients in the ’80s and ’90s. But she’d spent decades building the Lin family brand, packaging Garrett as a handsome prince for all the young female fans to fantasize over. Being gay wasn’t part of the business plan.

“At first I was scared,” he said. “I felt like I needed to figure it out on my own, before I shared it with anyone. But now…” He scrubbed a hand over his neck. “Maybe I like having a part of myself that’s not public.”

“Well, your secret’s safe with me. And if you want to let people think I’m your girlfriend, that’s fine.”

He smiled. “Are you seriously volunteering to be my beard?”

“I mean, I kind of am already?”

“The way we skated tonight isn’t going to hurt those rumors, is it?”

“Not at all.”

Garrett gestured to the champagne bottle in my hand. “Shall we toast to that?”

“I don’t know how to open it,” I admitted.

“Allow me.”

Garrett popped the cork with a practiced twist, and foam spilled into the surf. He took a sip before handing me the bottle. The champagne was lukewarm, and despite how much I’m sure the stuff cost, my face screwed up in disgust at the tart taste. I made myself swallow, then took another gulp for good measure.

We sat on one of the flatter rocks in the breakwater, facing the hotel. Though the performances were over, the party was still going strong, with a DJ spinning remixes of pop songs. Over the breeze, I could make out the soaring chorus of “Somewhere Only We Know.”

Garrett draped his suit jacket over my shoulders, and we spent a few minutes passing our stolen Dom Pérignon back and forth.

“You want to go back to the party?” he asked.

“So some dude old enough to be my grandfather can try to grab my ass when his third wife isn’t looking? No thanks.” I took another swig of champagne. “Besides, I’d rather steer clear of—”

“Heath?”

I almost told Garrett about the moment in the elevator. How close I’d come to ruining everything.

“It’s got to be hard for him,” Garrett said. “Seeing you with another guy.”

Classic Garrett Lin: always able to put himself in someone else’s shoes, to empathize even when the other party didn’t deserve it.

“He used to hate all this,” I said. “The parties, the schmoozing with fancy people. Now he’s better at it than I am. I swear, they take one look at me, and they can sense it.”

“Sense what?”

“That I’m small-town Midwestern trash.”

After learning Garrett’s big secret, my own seemed trivial in comparison.

He wrinkled his brow. “I thought you were from Chicago.”

“North of Chicago—this tiny suburb called ‘The Heights.’ Very different.”

I’d spent most of my waking hours with Garrett over the past few years, but we rarely spoke about anything besides skating. That night on the beach, it felt like we were meeting each other for the first time.

“Trust me,” he said, “they’re all as self-conscious as you are. Everyone’s way too busy worrying how they look to look twice at anyone else.”

“Easy for you to say. You’re rich.”

“My mother’s rich.”

“Same thing. You grew up in this world.”

“That’s true. But she didn’t.”

I looked at him. “What?”

“She grew up in Sugar Land, Texas. Her family owned an office supply store.”

“What?”

“They lived in an apartment above the storefront. Sheila ’s not even her real name.”

“What’s her real name?”

“Lin Li-Mei. She changed it when she left home, I guess. Her parents both died in the ’90s, but that’s what it said in their obituaries. ‘Survived by a daughter, Lin Li-Mei.’?”

Garrett tipped the bottle back again, then passed it to me; there were only a few swallows left. My head was swimming, but I couldn’t tell how much was from the alcohol and how much from what he’d told me.

“Bella never mentioned any of this,” I said.

“She doesn’t know. At least, I don’t think she does.”

More secrets between the twins. I’d truly believed they told each other everything.

“I always knew she was hiding something about her past,” Garrett said. “I thought it would be…I don’t know, scandalous or shocking. But her parents sounded totally normal.”

That was exactly why she’d hidden them. Their mundanity didn’t fit into the narrative she wanted to create. The legend of Sheila Lin.

Bella told me once about how, when she and Garrett were kids, they’d spend hours combing through newspaper clippings about the male gold medalists from the Sarajevo Games, searching for any family resemblance. Why only the gold medalists? I’d asked her.

Because, she said, whoever our father was, he must have been exceptional. Otherwise she wouldn’t have decided to keep us.

Now I know Garrett better, and I understand what he was trying to tell me: the Sheila Lin I idolized wasn’t real. She was a carefully constructed character, a beautiful mask not even her own children could glimpse behind. But that night, fizzing with expensive champagne and Olympic dreams, that isn’t at all what I heard.

Learning Sheila had come from nothing and nowhere didn’t disillusion me. It gave me hope—that I could transform myself as completely as she had.

The champagne bottle was empty. I stood up, swaying a bit—the hazards of being an infrequent drinker with an elite athlete body-fat percentage. Garrett stood too, and had to grab the edge of the rock to steady himself.

“We should eat something,” he said. “Maybe there’s still food left at the party?”

“Or we could be antisocial and order room service.”

The party guests were probably too wasted themselves to notice the state we were in, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

Garrett tucked my arm through his, and we staggered up the beach together to collect my shoes. As I reached down to retrieve them, his suit jacket slipped off my shoulder, dragging in the sand. He pulled it back into place and wrapped it tighter around my shoulders. I felt warm and cared for, closer to him than ever. If I hadn’t seen him with Ellis earlier, I would have given serious thought to kissing Garrett at midnight.

“What sort of food should we order?” he asked as we continued toward the hotel.

“Something with cheese. ”

Garrett laughed, knocking into my side. He slipped his arm under the jacket to hold my waist. “You can take the girl out of the Midwest, but you can’t take the Midwest out of th—”

He stopped. Someone stood ahead of us, blocking the path.

Heath.