Paper Princess (The Royals #1)(95)

I haven’t been in Reed’s bedroom before—he always hangs out in mine—but tonight I’m not going to wait for him to come to me. Gideon really shook me up, and Reed is the only one who can help me make sense of his brother’s strange behavior.

I reach his door and lift my hand to knock, then smile ruefully because God knows no one in this house ever knocks on my door. They just waltz in like they belong in my room. So I decide to give Reed a taste of his own medicine. Childish as it is, I kinda hope he’s jerking off in there, just to teach him a lesson about the importance of knocking.

I throw open the door and say, “Reed, I—”

The words die in my throat. I stumble to a stop and gasp.





35





The clothes litter the floor like an obscene breadcrumb trail. I follow the path with my eyes. High-heeled shoes tipped over on their sides. Running shoes bracketing them. A shirt, a dress, under—I close my eyes as if I can erase the images but when I open them again, it’s unchanged. Lacy black things—things I would never wear—look as if they were dropped just before their owner climbed into bed.

My gaze flickers upward, past strong calves, over knees, beyond a pair of hands loosely clasped together. Up the ladder of his bare, ridged abdomen, pausing at a new scratch on his left pectoral, about where his heart is supposed to be, stopping to meet his gaze.

“Where’s Easton?” I blurt out. My mind rejects the scene. I superimpose a different story than the one laid out in front of me. A story where I’ve stumbled into Easton’s room, and Reed, in a booze-induced haze, stumbled into the wrong room, too.

But Reed just stares stonily back at me, daring me to question his actions.

There’s no way that Reed is going without, I hear Val whisper in my ear.

“The guys you were meeting for beers?” I toss out desperately. I give Reed every chance to spin an account different than the one I see before me. Lie to me, dammit! But he remains stubbornly silent.

Brooke rises like a ghostly specter from behind him, and the earth stops. Time stretches out as she slides her hand up Reed’s spine, over his shoulder and then brings her manicured fingers across his chest.

There’s no question she’s naked. She kisses Reed’s neck, all the while looking at me. And he doesn’t move. Not one muscle.

“Reed…” His name is no more than a whisper, a painful scratch against my throat.

“Your desperation is sad.” Brooke’s voice sounds wrong in this room. “You should leave. Unless…” She stretches out a bare leg and drapes it outside of Reed’s hips, which are still covered in the cotton of his sweatpants. “Unless you want to watch.”

The pain in my throat gets worse as she remains wrapped around him and he makes no effort to move away.

Her hand drifts down his arm and when it reaches his wrist, he moves—a tiny, almost imperceptible flinch. I watch with alarm as her fingers glide across his abs, and before she can take hold of what I’d started to believe belonged to me, I turn abruptly and leave.

I had been wrong. Wrong about so many things that my mind can’t catalog them all.

When we were moving around so often, I thought I needed roots. When Mom had her umpteenth boyfriend who leered at me too long, I wondered if I needed a father figure. When I was alone at night and she was working long, tiring hours waiting tables, stripping and God knows what else to keep me fed and clothed, I longed for siblings. When she was sick, I prayed for money.

And now I have all of that and I am worse off than before.

I run to my bedroom and stuff my backpack full of my makeup, my two pairs of skinny jeans, five T-shirts, underwear, stripper gear from Miss Candy’s and my mother’s dress.

I keep the tears at bay because crying isn’t going to get me out of this nightmare. Only putting one foot in front of the other.

The house is deathly silent. The echoes of Brooke’s laughter when I told her that there was one good and decent man out there bounces from one side of my skull to the other.

My imagination conjures up visions of Brooke and Reed. His mouth on her, his fingers touching her. Outside the house, I stumble to the corner and vomit.

Acid coats my mouth but I push on. The car starts immediately. I shove it into gear and, with shaking hands, navigate down the driveway. I keep waiting for that movie moment when Reed runs out of the house, screaming for me to come back.

But it never happens.

There’s no rain-filled reunion and the only moisture are the tears I can’t hold back any longer.

The monotone voice of the GPS directs me to my destination. I shut off the engine, pull out the title to the car and shove it in my Auden book. Auden wrote that when the boy falls from the sky after calamity after calamity, he still has a future somewhere and that there’s no point in dwelling on one’s loss. But did he suffer this? Would he have written that if he had lived my life?

I rest my head on the steering wheel. My shoulders shake from my sobs and my stomach heaves again. I lurch out of the car and stagger on shaky legs to the entrance of the bus station.

“You all right, honey?” the ticket counter attendant asks, looking worried. Her kindness wrenches another sob from me.

“My-my grandmother passed,” I lie.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. Funeral then?”

I jerk my head in a nod.