Believe (True Believers #3)(23)
Author: Erin McCarthy

The look he gave me was so skeptical that I made a face back at him.

My phone buzzed in my lap. When I glanced down I saw that Phoenix had sent me a text. Glancing down and up in the ridiculous hope that no one would guess what I was doing, I read the text.

Ink I want. What do u think?

It was his sketch of the snake from the park. I couldn’t imagine where that was going to fit on his body, but I guess there were parts I hadn’t seen yet. Yet? I felt my cheeks grown warm and when I raised my eyes I felt the beady-eyed stare of my grandmother. She said something in Spanish and I had no clue what it was.

But I didn’t really want to know.

When I got back to the house around seven, Rory and Kylie were watching TV and they waved to me. “Sit.” Kylie patted the couch next to her. “We totally need to catch up.”

I should. I knew I had to. But I panicked. I couldn’t sit there and pretend nothing had happened. I wasn’t ready, or strong enough, and the scene from that morning was still fresh in my mind. The embarrassment I had felt when I had seen Nathan.

“I actually feel sick,” I said. “I have super bad cramps. I need to lay down.”

“Oh, bummer,” Kylie said. “Take some Midol.” She didn’t look the least bit suspicious because Kylie never believed anyone had ill intention. It was a gift she had, of pure happiness, all the time. Happiness I would destroy if she found out the truth.

Rory was eyeing me like she knew there was more to it than that, but she would never ask. She would think about it, analyze, study me. The one person I really had to avoid, truthfully, was Jessica. And, of course, Tyler. He knew almost all there was to know, but even he didn’t know it went way beyond just making out in a car. Obviously Nathan wasn’t going to tell, though I didn’t want to see him either.

“Thanks. Glad you’re both back,” I said, forcing a smile.

Then I went down the hall and shut the door firmly to my little room. Sighing, I fell onto my bed and answered Phoenix.

We texted back and forth for three hours, about everything, about nothing, until the TV in the living room went off and the line of light under my door disappeared. I felt safe in my room and relieved when Rory and Kylie went to bed. Classes started the next day, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for the pressure of schoolwork, but at midnight, in the dark, with Phoenix distracting me, I thought I could deal.

He was funny, in a sly, side door kind of way.

He was also clearly interested in keeping the conversation going, and maybe it was me, maybe it would have been anyone who would talk to him, but I was grateful.

And even as I worried that developing feelings for a guy I felt grateful to was seriously pathetic, I couldn’t stop myself.

Nite, I finally texted him when my eyes wouldn’t stay open anymore.

See you tomorrow.

I closed my eyes, but I wished he was lying next to me, his quiet, steady breathing soothing me the way it had the past two nights.

It wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all.

I knew I should cancel lunch with him. I knew I should pull away. That I couldn’t let myself get pulled into a friendship I wasn’t ready for, because I was still too raw, still holding on to my secret.

But I couldn’t pull away.

Just the opposite.

***

When I saw Phoenix walking across the food court in the university center the next day, I bit my lip to keep from smiling too broadly. I was sitting at a table with plastic chairs around it, my backpack on the floor next to me. I had decided to wear another sundress again because they were so comfortable. My leg stubble was starting to grow back in, which meant I was on the edge of being a hippie, but the skirt was long enough that I had decided I didn’t care. Phoenix was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, nothing weird, but without a backpack, he did look a little unusual. But what mostly struck me was the way he moved through the crowd, looking neither right or left, with a confidence and an aggressive walk that made people shift out of his way, probably without even realizing they did it.

He was swinging car keys around his finger, which meant he was ignoring his lack of a license again. I wondered why he didn’t worry that if he got pulled over, he would wind up back in jail. When he got closer to me, the corner of his mouth turned up, and he was doing what I was doing—trying not to smile too much. We were both like a couple of middle schoolers making eye contact at a dance.

Flipping his hair out of his eye, he dropped into the chair next to me, his legs sprawling out. “Hey.”

“Hey. You found me okay.”

He smiled. “I have good tracking skills. You know, and the texts with the specific instructions like ‘Next to KFC in the food court’ helped, too.”

“Good.”

“Though I don’t think you needed to point out what you’re wearing. I’m pretty sure I’d recognize you whether your dress was floral or solid.”

I wasn’t sure why I had done that. He was right. We didn’t recognize people based on their clothes, so why would I think he needed a description of my sundress to find me? “I overexplain. Sorry. What do you want to eat? I have a ton of points on my meal plan and I never use them all, so lunch is on me.”

“I can pay for myself,” he said, even though we both knew he couldn’t.

“But why should you when I have all this credit? Last year there was, like, two hundred bucks unused at the end of the year, and it doesn’t get credited back to you.” I didn’t have a meal plan anymore since I wasn’t living in the dorm, but he didn’t know that. I had a swipe card that billed everything to a central account where my tuition and books showed up, too. I figured I would go in and pay the food expenses myself before my parents saw it and it would allow me to trick Phoenix into letting me pay for lunch.

“Okay,” he said, but he looked reluctant. He did insist on carrying my tray back to the table after we ordered. I got a bowl of soup and he got a burrito the size of my head.

When we sat back down, the group of girls at the table next to us stared boldly. I knew one of them from my literature class, and the others I had seen at parties, but I didn’t know their names. I smiled tightly at them when we made eye contact, but they didn’t look away. I could hear them whispering.

“OMG, who is that chick Robin with? Is he like her bodyguard or something?”

I knew that Phoenix heard them, too, because his shoulders were rigid, but otherwise he showed no change in emotion. He was better, a thousand times better, at hiding his emotion than I was. I knew I probably looked uncomfortable. But I just sat there and spread out my napkin in my lap.