A little laugh bubbled out of my lips.
“What could possibly be funny right now, Margot?” Borden asked, looking over at me like I was a lunatic.
I laughed again and shook my head. “Homework,” I said, knowing I was indeed smiling like a lune. “For the first time in almost my entire life, I don’t have to stress about homework again.”
It took a second, but Borden did huff out a laugh. He shook his head and looked ahead. “I’m going to get a call from my father the second I get back to my apartment, and I can guarantee you one hundred percent he’s going to tell me I’m cut off forever, and you’re gleeful about not having homework?”
I shook my head at my own ridiculousness. “I’m sorry, Borden,” I said, meaning it. “I know this is awful and it’s definitely going to hit me hard later, what this all really means. But yes, for just this moment, I’m just really freaking grateful I don’t have to do homework tonight.”
Borden laughed. And then he laughed some more. And then we were both laughing and crying and holding our middles and looking up to the sky.
So much had changed in the last two days. My head was spinning from it all.
“Hey, do you have anything better you need to do right now?” I asked as a thought occurred to me.
“Apparently not,” Borden said with a chuckle.
“I’ve got an idea. It would be helpful if you came with me.”
Chapter Twenty
I marveled that evening as I walked back home by myself. It had worked. Really, this was the true test. And it had worked.
Borden and I had gone and grabbed the three rocks that had now stayed gold for a few days. We’d gone into town and taken it to a jeweler. He’d been suspicious and asked a lot of questions. We’d done a lot of lying and thankfully, we were both getting quite good at it. In the end, the man had bought all three lumps of gold. And now I had a huge amount of cash in my purse.
I felt nervous on the walk home. Borden tried to insist on walking me home, but I’d told him I was fine, despite how I actually felt. This was more money than I’d ever had in my entire life, combined. It was enough to buy myself a car, a brand new one. But I had other plans.
Now that I wasn’t in school, I needed to pay my own way around home.
I wanted to pay my own way to the UK when we went in a few weeks.
And I needed to start saving up. Because now that I was done with school, every other plan I had was accelerated.
I was going to start saving up to go to the owners of Asteria House and make them an offer. I needed to start coming up with the money to make the repairs needed to make it livable.
I stopped at the grocery store on the way home and got everything I needed to make Dad’s favorite meal—meatloaf with mashed potatoes and asparagus. I took my time, making it the best I could possibly do. I even cleaned the house, top to bottom. I wanted him in as good of a mood as possible.
When he walked in, he looked around and sniffed the air. And I instantly felt the mood surrounding him lift just a little.
“You hungry?” I asked, offering a nervous smile.
He didn’t say anything, just nodded and followed me into the kitchen.
I dished him up a plate and set it in front of him, an extra-large portion that should keep him happy and full.
“Today was interesting,” he said after a few minutes of silent eating.
“Oh, yeah?” I asked, nervous to step into it all.
“I was getting a lot of particular looks today in class,” he said, meeting my eyes as he raised an eyebrow. “And there was a lot of behind-hand whispering. And most of them weren’t being particularly quiet.”
“I’m really sorry I embarrassed you, Dad,” I said, jumping right into my apology. “I never meant to make you look bad.”
He made a little grunt noise. “Actually, everyone seemed quite thrilled that for once, someone had dared to stand up to the Society Boys.”
My eyes widened as I looked up at my dad.
“They were all quite impressed at the way you and Borden threw caution to the wind and went after them so directly.”
I covered my smile up with a hand over my mouth. “Really?”
At my amusement, Dad glared at me. “The students might be singing you two as heroes. But that doesn’t mean I’m not exceptionally disappointed and a fair bit angry.”
That sobered me instantly. “I know.”
Dad took another bite and I could see the gears turning in his head as he thought. “And you should know. I’m not even a student, and I could hear the rumors and speculation running rampant already. People are wondering if you and Nathaniel broke up.”
I felt all of the color drain out of my face. “Why would they think that?”
Dad gave me a look, one that said he was questioning my intelligence at the moment. “Because you were with Borden, getting in trouble. They’re thinking you and Borden are a couple now.”
I sat straighter, my gaze falling to the tabletop. I hadn’t even considered it, what it would look like. Borden and I were together all the time.
But yesterday was different.
“Are you and Nathaniel broken up?” Dad asked, his tone a little softer and quieter. “Is there something going on between you and Borden?”
My eyes rose to meet Dad’s. I stared at him for two solid seconds, not knowing exactly what to say.
“I don’t know what’s going on with me and Nathaniel,” I said. “As you saw on Saturday night, we still have a few disagreements on how we deal with conflict. We need to talk.”
Dad continued to hold my gaze. “And you and Borden?”
I blinked twice. Something twisted in my stomach. “Me and Borden, nothing. We’re friends. He…” I paused, trying to explain it. “I’m not the kind of person who can just sit back and let people walk all over me or hurt the people I love. That might work for Nathaniel. But I can’t. And Borden isn’t asking me to be someone different than who I am.”
“That sounds a little bit like the start of a relationship,” my father said quietly.
I sat there in stunned silence. My stomach was doing strange things. It was angry and confused, just the same as my heart. “It’s not,” I said shortly. “I love Nathaniel. We might have problems, but that hasn’t changed.”
But as I got up and rinsed my empty plate, I found my mind going deeper and deeper into everything. How we handle conflict is a huge part of a relationship. As we’d now proven, Nathaniel and I took very different approaches. And it had come up twice now, causing a huge rift.
Where did that leave us?
So over the next three hours, while I waited for him to get off his shift in the library, I laid in my bed, feeling utterly sick to my stomach, trying to sort out what needed to be said and what had to be done.
At eight-fifty, when I got out of bed to walk to the solarium, I didn’t know. I had zero answers.
So, feeling like a nervous wreck, I walked across the grounds, no longer as a student, but an intruder.
Light was softly glowing as I walked down the stone path to the solarium. I knew there was something really wrong when I knocked first instead of walking right in.
Nathaniel had been lying on the couch, but sat up when I walked in and shut the door. There was a fire roaring in the fireplace, and that was the only light. His face was cast in an ethereal glow. He looked like a mystical god. His features were already sharp and brooding, enhanced ten-fold right then in the dim firelight.