The Boy and His Ribbon (The Ribbon Duet 1)

Where was I? Let me just skim over what I wrote yesterday and try not to roll my eyes at the patheticness of unrequited love.

…

Ah yes, okay, the party.

We arrived.

Tom got me some punch that unfortunately was alcohol free, and Tina and I bounced around in our skirts and fanned our pretty fans, enjoying the stares of young students and wiser university goers, steadily growing more and more silly as the night went on.

For an hour, I refused to let myself think about Ren.

I pretended I didn’t care if he didn’t come. I spun and laughed and flirted all for me, not to get back at him. So it killed me to realise how fake I turned out to be because I knew the moment he arrived.

My skin prickled. My heartbeat quickened. And everything inside me slipped from chaos to calm.

In the middle of a manic Halloween party filled with Frankensteins and vampires and zombies, I knew the second the matching piece of my heart arrived.

Sad right?

Poetic?

Star-crossed?

Screwed up?

Probably all the above.

But probably not as screwed up as the next part.

You see, I knew the second Ren arrived, and instead of going to him, being a good hostess, and smoothing over the troubled waters between us, I grabbed Tom and clutched him close.

We slow danced with werewolves and fairies, and when he gathered me closer, I mewled in invitation, and when he grinded his hips against me, I gasped in appreciation, and when his head lowered, and his eyes sought mine, and his lips crashed down, I dove my fingers into his messy sable hair and threw away all the decency and morality left inside me.

I became a husk. A chewed-up disgusting person who willingly kissed a boy all the while pretending it was someone else.

And by pretending it was someone else, I kissed harder, deeper, sexier than I ever had before. My first real kiss, and it was with a ghost of the boy I truly wanted.

I let go. I lived my fantasy.

I clawed at his hair, I tangled my tongue with his, and I fell so deeply in love with my illusion that when I opened my eyes and snuggled into his chest, I breathed the wrong name.

“Ren,” I moaned with my body aching and breasts swelling and wetness gathering.

And Tom had pulled me away with a terrified look in his green gaze. We’d stood motionless on the dance floor while others swirled around us as he stared into my ripped apart secret and knew.

He knew.

And there was no going back.

* * * * *

I wish there was more to the tale.

But I’ve sat here for a while thinking what to write, and honestly, there isn’t anything else.

I wished I could say that Ren came stalking from the mismatch dressed up crowds, yanked me out of Tom’s arms, and planted his mouth on mine in punishment for ever kissing another boy when I’d always been his.

But it didn’t happen.

Tom went to get us more drinks, this time with alcohol laced in its sugary depths, and Tina and I continued to dance, but my smiles were brittle and my laugh hollow.

Tom stayed close, but things had changed—awareness had been shown, harboured secrets blown wide apart. His touches were just habit, and that night, we agreed that it was fun and all, but it was better if we went our separate ways.

I wasn’t sad. I was relieved. And that was yet another nail in my otherwise rotten coffin.

Meanwhile, as I was getting dumped for hurting two people in one, my heart constantly zeroed in on where Ren was.

Occasionally, he’d appear in the crowd, arms crossed and leg cocked over the other as he leaned against the perimeter, an outsider to the party, a watcher on the wall, close enough to protect me from harm but willing to let me make my own stupid mistakes.

I didn’t know if he’d seen me kiss Tom.

I didn’t know if he’d been hurt or didn’t care—perhaps he was relieved that I was manhandling someone else for a change.

I didn’t know.

But when it was time to go home, he walked with me.

He carried my high heels and gave me a pair of flip-flops he’d thoughtfully stashed in his back pocket, and guided me through streets filled with ghosts and demons back to an apartment where he went to his bed and I went to mine, and through the thin walls, I heard him tear apart the meagre furniture we had, howling at the moon.

All the while, I cried into my pillow.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

REN

* * * * * *

2016

WE DIDN’T EVEN make it to Christmas before another catastrophe found us.

For weeks, I kept the fact that I’d seen Della kissing Tom hidden. When she looked at me over breakfast of toast and cereal on the weekends, I tasted the question she wanted to ask. When I arrived home from a long day at the milking yards and she had a home-cooked meal for two, I heard the query she wanted to know.