Chapter 20

CHAPTER TWENTY

LAINEY

I stay in my room, curled up with Professor X, even though I hear Damien's car come back. I don't check my phone when it beeps. I'm raw without fully understanding why, my mind running through what Claire said over and over again.

I just want you to love yourself like I love you.

I also keep thinking about those Tarot cards and what happened last night—tackling Jake at Mrs. Rosings's house, helping him, letting him touch me.

Pulling away from him.

Why?

Why couldn't I let myself have that one moment of release?

I'd like to think it's because of him. He's so completely inappropriate, the last person I should be kissing or touching, but my patchwork heart knows better.

It's not him, it's me .

I don't trust myself.

The sun goes down, and I still haven't moved. Finally, there's a knock on my door.

"Don't come in."

It's Jake, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans from the bag I packed for him. His fox on fire is fully exposed, flames curling off its face and tail. Professor X, the traitor, leaps down from the bed and does figure eights around his legs.

"I said don't come in," I hiss, glowering, even though something inside of me lifts at the sight of him. I realize that I'm relieved to see him. Part of me had expected him to give Damien the slip.

"I've always been told I'm bad at listening to directions," he says with a smile. "You're the type of jailer who'd let your prisoner starve, aren't you? I thought it was customary to offer a captive stale bread and water."

I sit up, watching him. My stupid heart speeds up. "I was reasonably sure they'd let you eat. Nicole told me you were helping Damien with something."

He gives me a half smile. "I doubt you'd approve. We broke into a guy's house to find proof that he's been hiding resources from his ex-wife. I know how you feel about breaking and entering."

I shrug. "I've realized I was being hypocritical yesterday. Maybe it's myself I hate more than you."

He raises his eyebrows, scrutinizing me, and I have the feeling he sees it all—the self-doubt and hatred. The hot, pulsing need I've tried to rein into submission.

I swallow. "Did you find anything?"

A wicked smile stretches across his face. "We did. Damien'll have to backtrack the information to its source, but it's a start." His eyes blaze into me. "What have you stolen other than my fake necklace?"

"Lots of things."

"I'm gonna need more to go on than that."

I glance out the window at the front yard, taking in the little squat car parked there. "My not-a-sports car."

This is something I haven't told anyone else. Not Claire, not Nicole, not anyone. It's absurd to tell him, but again, I feel a certain freedom with Jake. He won't be staying, and he's in no position to judge me. Maybe I needed to confess the truth to someone, and he's the best choice.

Jake grimaces. "You stole that car? There's a world of cars out there, and that's the one you looked at and said, ‘Screw law and order. This has to be mine?'"

I throw my pillow at him, feeling laughter bubble up. "It's not like I took it from a used car lot, you ass. It was my parents' car."

Emotion flashes across his face, not lingering long enough for me to name it, and then he whistles. "What did they pull to get a girl like you to do a thing like that?"

I stand up for the first time in hours, putting a hand on my hip. "What do you mean a girl like me?"

He shrugs, walking over to my desk and picking up the small glass bird Claire gave me for my birthday last year—maybe her too-subtle way of telling me I was in a cage and should get out while I could. I take it from his hand, feeling the immediate sizzle of touching him, and throw it back down, nearly breaking it wings.

His mouth twitches as he gives me a sidelong look. "I wasn't saying it to offend you. You don't strike me as the kind of person who'd steal something from someone unless they deserve it."

"You think some people deserve to be robbed?" I ask, feeling a roiling of self-righteous fury, although it's more directed at myself than him. After all, I do too. I'm the child who wanted to be Robin Hood, the self-righteous woman who stole his necklace without really understanding what she was doing.

He's less than a foot away, close enough that I feel the heat roiling off of him. I wonder whether he felt a rush of adrenaline when he broke into that man's house tonight, of vindication when he found the information they needed. Both of those things are fuel to me, and it's so hard to come by them honestly.

"I really do." Then he lifts his hands to face me, palms out. "Which is not me saying that I haven't taken things from people who didn't deserve it, but that's me, and we're talking about you." He watches me. "So what did they do?"

I shrug. "They wanted me to get married."

"To the cheater? See, I told you, assholes."

I smile and shake my head. There's no reason to say anything else, but I find myself continuing, "He was rich and important . That's what they cared about. When he broke off the engagement, they accused me of not trying hard enough. Of ruining everything for all of us. That was supposed to be my job, you know. Marrying a wealthy, connected man. They'd been pushing me toward it for years." A laugh gushes from me. "You know…he got engaged almost immediately to the other woman, and when I went over to my parents' apartment to ask if I could borrow the car to come here, my mom threw Todd's engagement announcement at me. I'm guessing she thought it would be this powerful gesture, but it kind of just fluttered through the air and fell halfway between us. It was funny."

He doesn't say anything, his expression as readable as a brick wall. "So you took the car without asking."

I shrug. "Seemed only right."

"I'm glad you took their car, but you might have picked the wrong lesson to teach them. You should have taken whatever they value most."

I huff a little laugh. "Then I would have had to take them , and no thank you. Still, you're right about the car. They probably don't care. They haven't bothered to report it stolen. They didn't even call me to bitch about it. I'm guessing they're waiting for me to apologize ."

It probably goes without saying they'll be waiting forever.

"Maybe they don't want to get you in trouble," he says, but his expression is slightly sympathetic now. Fantastic. The thief I've captured feels sorry for me.

I shake my head slightly, looking down at the car again before I meet his gaze. "I doubt they care. Maybe they're happy I'm gone. I didn't do my part. I was supposed to marry a rich man. A man with connections."

His eyes beating into me, he says, "It wasn't your only chance. Maybe Nina will run off with the necklace, and you can have a go at Anthony."

"Is that your way of asking me if that's my angle?" I ask, horrified.

"Nothing personal." He straightens a framed photo on the wall, as if he's incapable of keeping still, and I barely repress the urge to slap his hand away and to hiss for him to leave my things—and me—alone. "I need to know."

"It's not my angle," I snap, pissed off even though it makes sense for him to question me. "I'm trying to save Nina from the worst mistake she's ever made. It's a mistake I'll never make again."

His gaze finding mine again, he inclines his head slightly, barely a nod. "Did you take anything from him ?"

"His name's Todd."

He snorts. "Of course it is. And what did you take from dear Todd?"

Rolling my eyes, I nod toward the very expensive Yankees bat propped in the corner of my room.

Jake walks over, obviously grateful for the excuse to touch another one of my things. Picking it up, he turns it to study it from different angles. Whistles in appreciation. "They all signed it."

"Yankees fan?"

He watches me for a second before setting the bat down, then says, "I've been trained to recognize valuable things. Rare things. You're a rare thing, hellcat."

I feel raw and exposed, like a bug that's been hiding under a rock turned over by a child.

"You said he didn't hit you," he presses. "But I can tell he hurt you. What did he do?"

He sounds like he actually gives a shit about the answer, although he has no reason to. Maybe that's why I respond. Or perhaps it's because he's not going to judge me, the way Claire might, the way even Nicole could. "It wasn't all his fault."

"Oh?"

"You stole Anthony's wallet so you could get to know him."

He shakes his head slightly, walking over a couple of steps so he can run his fingers over the carved knob at the right foot of my bed. "So we're shifting the subject back to me again. I'm flattered."

"No," I say, capturing his hand on top of the knob. "Do you always have to touch something?"

His eyes are amused as they meet mine, his hand stilling beneath my touch. It's his right hand, I register. The hand that nearly made me come last night. The fingers I watched him lick as if he'd just had a gourmet meal. There's a needy ache between my legs that I resent. "Yes. Would you prefer for me to touch you ?"

I pull away as if he'd burned me. Clearing my throat, I say "My point was that I did something similar with Todd…"

"You stole his wallet?"

"No…but I pretended to trip in front of him, and I let him help me up. He liked being seen as the good guy. The hero."

He doesn't comment, probably because he knows as well as I do that the best way to get someone to talk is to wait on them.

"So it was a lie from the beginning. I knew who he was. I studied the way his friends and their girlfriends dressed and talked. Their interests. I took notes . I paid attention to what he liked and disliked. And then I changed what I wore. Which classes I took. Which activities I pursued outside of class. I became exactly what he wanted." I pause, swallowing. Not quite sure why I'm telling him all of this, but needing to, anyway.

He runs his fingers over my arm without saying anything, his eyes on mine. Waiting. Somehow he knows I need to say the words, and he's silently telling me he's here to listen.

"But after we got engaged…I…I thought I loved him, and I wanted him to know the real me. But every time I tried to express myself—me, not the person I'd created for him—he'd try to snuff it out. He'd say I was being impulsive, or foolish, or classless." I shrug. "If I bought something he didn't like, he'd throw it away. If I got a drink with my friend Claire, he'd retaliate by getting one with a childhood girlfriend. If he got mad, he'd make me get down on my knees and beg for forgiveness. He didn't like it when I did anything by myself. We had this huge apartment, but it felt like a cage. It was suffocating."

"And he never made you come," he says, his voice rough, and I almost laugh, because of course that's where his mind went.

"No, but that was partly my fault. I had trouble letting go with him. I overthought everything I did." I pause. "I was really good at faking it."

"He should have known. A real man would have known." His gaze is penetrating, and I look out the window again, down at that car sitting there in the dark like an accusation.

"Maybe he did know. Maybe he didn't care." A sigh gusts out of me. "It was my own fault, though. I tricked him… So if I was unhappy, I have no one to blame but myself. And maybe my parents, for convincing me that the only way I could be someone was by marrying a rich man. They didn't care how he treated me."

He doesn't say anything for a long moment, his regard a living thing, breathing down my neck, caressing my spine, whispering in my ear, and then finally he says, "Sounds to me like Todd got everything he wanted, and you got none of what you wanted. Are you sure you're the one who tricked him?"

Emotion suddenly gushes through me. Raw and consuming. Maybe this is what I've been dancing around for months. For years . I wanted to think I had the power all along—that I was fooling him and letting him do those things to me for my own purposes. Because I was getting what I'd aimed to get. But all along, he'd been taking, and I'd kept giving him exactly what he wanted, when he wanted it, and how he wanted it. Adding a little cherry on top for good luck. I'd folded all of the stuff that was important to me inward, hiding it from him—and from myself too. And I'd let it go on for years. The only thing that had saved me was that I'd found out he was cheating.

He'd used me and then spat me out, and my parents had set me up for it. They'd set me up, period. My mother's constant whispering in my ear.

Lainey, he just needs a little push and he'll propose.

Lainey, it'll all be worth it.

Lainey, you were born with that wildness inside of you, but you'd better swallow it up if you want to keep him.

Tears prick at my eyes, but I'm angry too. My whole body is on fire with it. Todd's lucky he's in New York. So are my parents. They're lucky .

"I…think I'd like to be alone now," I tell Jake numbly, only then realizing he still hasn't moved his hand off my arm. His fingers are curled around it, his head bowed down toward mine. A different feeling surges beneath the anger, but I tackle it and muzzle it.

He doesn't argue.

He doesn't try to talk me around.

He just nods and says, again, "You know where to find me."