No.
Absolutely not.
It doesn’t make my heart spin in my chest. It shouldn’t.
I’m not that girl anymore. I don’t like to be locked up or chased after.
I don’t.
I’m smarter.
“No,” I tell him, trying to sound all authoritative.
“Maybe it makes you tingle a little bit to find out that even after two years, the first thing I do when I come back to town is to hunt you down and watch your every move.”
“It makes me feel violated.”
He watches me a beat.
Then, “Relax. Stalking isn’t an interest of mine. I hear it’s something crazy ex-girlfriends do. Or girls who fall in love with you even after having been warned. No, wait. I think they steal cars.” He throws me a mock boyish look as he sips his coffee again. “My bad.”
I clutch my glass tightly. “Are you —”
But he continues, “Anyway, you have a bad habit of writing really long emails to my sister. And my sister has a bad habit of blurting it all out.”
“Tempest?”
“The one and only.”
I frown, trying to put all the pieces together. “She told you I was gonna be here?”
“A word of advice: if you want to keep secrets from me, don’t tell them to my sister.”
Tempest.
My best friend from my old life and the sweet little sister of the guy I fell in love with.
I did tell Tempest where I was going to be, yes.
I usually do.
We pretty much email each other every other day.
After the whole car-stealing debacle and him pressing charges against me and me almost landing in juvie, I thought I’d lose Tempest’s friendship as well.
Even though she helped me and stole his keys, she’s still his sister and so I thought she’d inevitably take his side.
But she never abandoned me.
She still came over to my house whenever she was in town; I wasn’t ready to go to her house though. She still visited me, hung out with me.
In fact, she was the one who got me through that last month of school, after the championship game and my dance that I didn’t get to do, and the whole horrible summer before I came to St. Mary’s.
We still see each other.
Although not as often as I’d like because of all the stupid outing rules of reform school, but I love her. Not today though.
Today I want to strangle her.
Because I thought we had a pact.
Like our brothers, we made a pact too after everything happened.
A pact of no brothers.
Meaning our brothers would have no place in our friendship.
We wouldn’t talk about them. We wouldn’t mention them. It would be like we had no brothers.
Although one thing never made sense to me.
I knew why I was making the pact, but I’m not sure why she did.
Why she never wanted to hear about Ledger, whom I know that she liked two years ago, and I never asked; she respected my space and so I respected hers.
So I don’t know why she’d rat my whole schedule out to her brother.
But anyway, right now I need to deal with him and ignore the slight sinking in my chest.
The absurd sinking.
That feels like disappointment.
Because he wasn’t really stalking me as I’d assumed.
See? Absurd.
“So she sent you here?” I ask, confused, my mind going two years back.
To that closet when he came to give me his sister’s birthday invitation. The day he gave me his name, Fae.
“No,” he says with an irritated frown. “No one sends me anywhere. But she does think that I should apologize.”
“For what?”
“She had a long list.”
I look at him for a beat. “I’m sure she did. But apology not accepted.”
“You should probably wait for me to apologize before you say that.” I open my mouth to say something but he goes on. “That’s not why I’m here. I’m here to ask you something.”
I draw back slightly. “What?”
His jaw moves back and forth in annoyance before saying, “Do you sneak out to Blue Madonna every week?”
“That’s none of your business.”
He studies my features for a few moments before sighing sharply. “I’m going to be honest with you, I didn’t want to see you again. It wasn’t my plan when I came back to this fuckhole town. But now I’m assuming you sneak out every week to go to your ballet studio. Like you do to go to that shitty bar with your friends. Is that correct?”
“It’s not a shitty bar,” I say, offended.
That frown on his forehead grows. “You’re joking.”
“I’m not. It’s a great bar.”
“It’s a dance bar, Fae. The only dance bar where when they put on the music, instead of dancing, you want to kill yourself.”
I ignore the flutter in my chest at Fae and say, “You only think that because you have crappy taste in music.”
It’s a lie. He doesn’t.
I like his taste in music.
It’s usually a mix of vintage rock bands and modern hip hop, and well, it’s not a secret that I love it. He knows that too; I’ve danced to it quite a lot, haven’t I?