Conventionally Yours (True Colors 1)

I had a new sneak-text from Cassie wishing me luck, and then the most improbable text of all. My mom. On her actual number, not a different phone like Cassie.

Your sister showed me the live stream of your matches yesterday. I’m proud of you. I’m sorry the past year has been so difficult for all of us.

Ha. All of us. All of us hadn’t had to deal with no health insurance, tax nightmares, financial aid disasters, begging for a place to live, choosing ramen to afford medicine. I had no doubt that it had been a difficult year for her, but she didn’t get to pretend it was the same as mine. It wasn’t. I was surprised at the depth of my anger. I’d been hurt and guilty so long that I wasn’t even sure when it had shifted to this white-hot rage, but I think Alden had something to do with it, the way he’d patiently told me over and over that none of it was my fault. And it wasn’t. It was Dad’s. And Mom’s for standing by him, and I was angry. So angry.

Her message continued, I love you. I can’t promise to change anything with your father, but I can do better myself. I’m sorry. But I am proud of you. Go out and win.

It was what I’d most wanted—acknowledgment and validation from my parents, one of them at least—but it rang hollow. She was proud of me, but where had she been when I’d needed her most? Their love had been conditional, and that was no love at all.

Holy wow. I let that thought ping around my head, knocking over long-held pillars of assumptions. Maybe it wasn’t love that hurt. It wasn’t love that screwed me over. Real love didn’t have conditions and limitations. People had failed me, let me down, hurt me. But not everyone was like that. Hadn’t Alden shown me compassion over and over? Was what we felt for each other the real deal?

I still wasn’t entirely sure, but for the first time, I wanted to see. I wanted to believe his words so badly. I paged back to his message, ready to reply.

“Our final round will begin in fifteen minutes. Players please check in at the judging station as soon as possible,” the PA system blared.

Hell. No time for a big, long message thread to Alden. Instead, I texted him a highly inadequate I’m coming. I’m sorry and I’m coming. Going to play my game.

And I was. I was going to play my game—on all levels. I was going to make my move and trust that it would be enough. That I would be enough. Trust that maybe, just maybe, I’d already won.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Alden

Conrad walking away was one of the worst moments of my life. And I didn’t chase after him. Couldn’t make my legs work. Instead, I sank onto a bench outside one of the closed meeting rooms. What had I done wrong? Why couldn’t I make Conrad believe me? To me, it was so simple—I loved him, I wanted him to win, and all he needed to do was believe me. But I also understood that I couldn’t make another person do or feel anything. I couldn’t make him love me back, couldn’t make him trust this, trust me, trust us.

But oh how I wanted to. And because I did love him—something I would have thought impossible even a few days earlier—I just wanted him to come back, play the final, get the win he deserved. Maybe he couldn’t love me back, but he could have that. I never would have thought I could be as happy for another person as for myself, but he’d proved me wrong, showed me that I had a capacity for caring that I’d honestly thought I might lack. I’d listened to the voices of others for so long, telling me how different I was, that I’d started to believe that maybe I couldn’t love.

Conrad had shown me otherwise, shown me what it meant to truly put someone else first, and if nothing else, I was grateful to him for that.

I pulled out my phone. I might not be able to chase after him, make myself any more vulnerable than I already had, but I could let him know that. I deliberated over wording far longer than I needed to, typing and erasing a dozen messages before finally settling on one.

Con, be safe. Come back and play your game. There. I wasn’t asking him to come back to me. Which obviously I wanted, but I was almost too scared to hope for.

Right as I hit Send, the door to the meeting room opened a crack, and two people slithered out—two women, one in Reaper Bride cosplay and the other in one of the pink “Ready to Lose?” shirts, holding hands and so into each other that they didn’t notice me before they were kissing passionately. From the way their clothes were askew, I gathered they’d been doing more than kissing in the empty room.