“You’re putting too much focus on that. I did you a favor.”
“Wow, you really, really don’t get it, do you?”
“No, I fucking don’t. Seriously, I can’t believe you’re fighting me on this. You don’t have any other options, beggars and choosers and all that. This is the next best option and you’re fighting me?”
She flinched as if I’d hit her. A wash of heat hit me then, scalding all over my ice-prone nerve endings. I knew then something had gone terribly, terribly wrong and my instinct was to fix it. To get it back on even keel where I could come at it from a different way. I reached for her, and she jerked away.
“Don’t touch me.”
“Tanith, come on. Let’s just keep talking about this and figure out where I’ve gone wrong.”
She shook her head. “No. Not if you can’t see how you hurt me, how what you just said plays into everything I’ve ever been told about how I should be grateful for the scraps that I get. Grateful that someone like you wants to date someone like me. You were supposed to go and fight for me. Not actually believe that you’re better than me in some way and that I should be beholden and/or grateful to you for getting me another job because you’re my boyfriend. I don’t want another job, I want Preston. That’s what I worked for. And instead of standing up to your mother, God, you did what you always do. Went around her. Hid. I should’ve known from the beginning when you said your mom shouldn’t know about us. And I was naive for going along with you, but I see now. You weren’t proud of me; you weren’t proud to have me as your girlfriend or someone you cared about. I’m temporary, so you hide me. You’re ashamed, when I’m the one who should be ashamed to be with you. We’re done, Owen.”
Shadows coiled around my heart, chasing away all the light as I stared at her. “You can’t be serious.”
“Oh, I’m plenty serious. I know, me, the scholarship girl, is breaking up with you, the Preston-Montgomery. I know it’s a shock to your system, but since you don’t actually have feelings, I’m sure you’ll get over it.”
She marched out of the study. I whipped around to call her back, to wait for her to turn back to tell me she didn’t mean it. But instead, all I saw was her ash-blond hair bouncing in its ponytail along her back as she walked out of my life.
Chapter 20
Tanith
My phone buzzed again, and I threw it across the room. Sloane, without even looking up from her calculus homework, snatched it out of midair before it could hit the wall.
“You could just turn it off,” she suggested mildly, her eyes still on her integrations and derivatives.
“Why should she have to turn it off when he’s the problem?” Sera asked, stepping out from our en suite bathroom and bringing the stinging smell of hair dye with her. She wore plastic gloves and an apron I was certain was from a sexy French maid Halloween costume.
“Seconded,” Aurora called from the toilet, which doubled as her salon chair when she needed to touch up her roots. “He should turn his phone off.”
Sloane set her pencil down and finally lifted her eyes from her paper to me. “I have some experience with obsessed Hellfire boys,” she said. “And I can tell you that he’s not going to stop. You’re either going to have to shut off your phone or do something that makes contacting you pointless.”
“Do something like break up with him? Because I already did that!” I fussed, throwing myself back on the bed.
“We could try killing him,” Sloane offered, in that way that I couldn’t be sure if she meant it or not.
Sera popped out from the bathroom again, her plastic gloves covered in black goop. “I propose we crush him to death with stacks of Gotham magazines. And then maybe smother him with all that floppy hair of his.”
“Seconded,” yelled Aurora from the toilet.
I blinked up at the ceiling, both touched by their loyalty and so miserable I couldn’t stand it. “I just wish I’d never known him,” I whispered to no one in particular. “Never seen him, never had a crush on him. Never kissed him that night in Ibiza. Because this is so much worse than him not knowing I exist. This is him knowing me, having me, being with me like no one else ever has . . . and still thinking I’m beneath him. That I need his charity. That I don’t know what’s best for myself. That one dream is as good as another for me because I should be grateful for any crumb I get.”
I realized I was crying. Again. I was so fucking sick of crying!
“I can’t wipe her cheeks because of the hair dye,” Sera said as she came next to the bed. “Sloane.”
“No, no, I don’t need anyone to wipe my tears away—”
Sloane sat down on the bed next to me, and with the seriousness of a sensei tending to a student’s injury, carefully lifted my glasses and pushed the tears off my cheeks.
I relented, sniffling, because it felt good to have someone be with me while I cried. It felt good not to be alone, even if that was the only part of right now that felt good.
“He was supposed to choose me,” I finally said, my voice barely audible. The tears kept coming, hot and fast. “He was supposed to choose me.”
The bed sunk near my feet and I looked down my body to see Aurora at the end. She had a plastic cap over her hair,
