After a lecture about believing in myself that I can’t see has anything to do with getting caught making out, my dad leaves and Bea escorts me back to my bunk, where I lie awake all night, waiting for the sun and a chance to call Nash.
I have to talk to him.
If I don’t, I’m going to go crazy.
The next morning, I sneak online during Photoshop class and track down the Geary’s phone number.
But for some reason, in the harsh light of day, I can’t bring myself to dial the number. I’m so mortified by the things my dad said last night, and also a little…afraid.
What if Nash hates me now? What if he took one look at my rhino dad and decided he wants nothing to do with me? Surely, if he still cared, he would have at least said goodbye, even if he had to shout it over his shoulder as Phil shoved him out the door.
I worry myself sick about it all day and almost pass out in the shower I’m so stressed out. Finally, I decide to stick a pin in the problem. I’ll call Nash when I get back home, where it will be safe to spend days crying my eyes out if things go wrong.
I can’t lose it here in front of my friends. They would freak out. I’m the upbeat, confident one, not the girl who falls apart because a boy doesn’t like her anymore.
Even if he is the best boy she’s ever met.
Four weeks later, after our final show and the reception for the parents, I spend the entire drive home from camp pumping myself up to face my fears.
I’m going to call him.
And it’s going to be okay.
Or at least it will be over, and I won’t feel like a coward anymore.
I call the minute I get home, before I start my laundry or grab a taco from the plate my sister, Lark, made to celebrate my return. I listen to the phone ring, my heart in my throat, until an old-fashioned sounding answering machine picks up.
Who even has those anymore?
I’m so shocked—and stressed about what I could say that will be worthy of being recorded for potentially everyone in the Geary household to hear—that I drop the phone back into its cradle without saying a word.
It takes me the rest of the day—and four tacos—to come up with a solid, family-friendly message that will get my point across to Nash without upsetting his parents, if they happen to be the first ones to hear it.
I write it out on a notecard, reading it aloud to myself over and over again before I call the next day.
But when I hear Mrs. Geary’s tired voice asking me to “leave my name and number,” I chicken out again. And again and again—five times total in my first week home.
I can’t seem to get anyone on the line, but maybe that’s on purpose? Maybe Nash somehow knows that unfamiliar number is mine and is refusing to pick up the phone on principle?
I’m still stressing about it—and trying to psych myself up to leave my message when a miracle happens.
I’m downtown, shopping for a first-day-of-school outfit with my friends, when Nash materializes around a corner with two other boys. They’re all eating corn dogs and laughing and he looks so gorgeous—and perfect and kind and familiar—that before I make a conscious decision to bolt, I’m dashing out of the store and hurrying to catch up with him.
“Nash, wait!” I call, holding my breath as he turns, praying he’ll be happy to see me, too.
But when his eyes meet mine they go cold. Almost as cool as his voice. “Hey there, Princess.”
When I was growing up, I enjoyed playing princess as much as any other little girl, but the way Nash says the word makes me want to rush home and burn every crown and tiara.
He is obviously not happy to see me. But can I blame him? I should have left a damned message. But surely, if I explain how nervous I was, he’ll understand. If only he were alone instead of flanked by two jocks, who are staring at me like a zoo animal.
“Can we talk?” I squeak, sounding about ten years old. “Please?”
“No thanks,” Nash says still sounding like a stranger. “Wouldn’t want to piss off your daddy.”
“Please,” I beg, willing him to see how sorry I am for the way things went down. “I can explain. I—”
“I’m sure you could, but you didn’t,” he cuts in. “So why bother now?”
“Because I want to apologize. And maybe…be friends again?”
Nash sighs.
His friends smirk, knowing smirks that make me suspect I’m not the first girl to beg Nash for a few minutes of his time.
Suddenly, in that moment, I begin to doubt everything I thought was true. Maybe Nash isn’t nice, and I wasn’t special to him. Maybe everything that went down between us at camp was just what my dad shouted the night he barreled into the director’s office—a trick to get into an innocent girl’s pants.
And then he says, “Friends? Were we ever friends?” and my heart drops into my stomach, making me regret every bite of pizza I had for lunch.
But I’m not going to let him see how much he’s hurt me.
“I guess not,” I say, covering with a bitchy curl of my lip as my thoughts race, searching for a verbal dart to throw that will wound him the way he’s wounded me. Only one thing comes to mind. “Too bad. My parents always taught me it was good manners to be kind to the less fortunate.”
It’s a low blow and a shitty thing to say. I know that, but in the moment all I care about is giving Nash a taste of his own medicine.
His flinch as my dart flies through the chink in his armor is so simultaneously gratifying and shame-inducing it makes my pulse race and my cheeks flush hot.
But he recovers quickly, shrugging me off. “Whatever. Yeah, I’m poor, but at least I’m not a spoiled brat. Or a liar.”
I want to tell him he’s crazy, to insist that I never lied, that every sweet thing I said to him and about him was the absolute truth.
But I can’t.
He’s not who I thought he was, and I’m not the type to take abuse lying down. I’m a fighter, always have been, always will be. So I simply arch what I hope is an amused brow and mutter, “Whatever, loser,” before spinning on my heel and walking back to join my friends.
So it begins.
And so it continues…
For the next three years—while I’m finishing high school, and Nash graduates and starts working construction with his uncle—the two of us exchange verbal grenades every time our paths cross.
Which, in a town the size of Bliss River, is way more often than I’d like.
By the time I move to Paris to study to be a pastry chef the summer after graduation, I can’t remember feeling anything for Nash but contempt.
I’ve forgotten the way he knocked me off my feet when I was fifteen, and I refuse to admit, even to myself, that no one has ever lit me up the way Nash Geary did one hot, summer night.
I forget I ever dreamed of a future with him…until the night something crazy forces me to remember.
Chapter Three
Aria
Twelve Years Later
“Ms. Aria March?” The man at the door is dressed in a fitted white polo shirt and khakis. He’s reasonably attractive and familiar-looking in a bland sort of way, but I can’t remember meeting him before.