Somewhere Only We Know(52)

Her silence went on forever. I felt myself drowning in it. Realizing that I had messed up. She wasn’t going to let it go.





CHAPTER FORTY-THREE


LUCKY


It was sweet and vulnerable of him to say that. But it was also maddening. I didn’t like Jack because he rescued me. Because he was a shield. I had Ren for that.

I liked him because he saw me. He seemed to care. Not only about me, but about the people in his life—his family, his cranky landlady.

Also, he made me laugh and fed me.

I lifted my chin. “I like to think I don’t need to be saved.”

His head snapped up, his eyes on mine in a second. Searching for something—that little give he was hoping for. I didn’t want him to see it. But it was there.

“However. I did need it then,” I admitted. “I was putting myself at risk all day. I mean, I have a full-time bodyguard, do you know that? He watches my door when I sleep.”

Jack shook his head. No, he couldn’t know that. And even though I was furious with him, I still wanted him to know. To know me.

“Well, thank you for saving me. In that moment.”

He blinked. Afraid to respond. The first time I had seen Jack so totally off-balance, not in control, since we met.

“Don’t thank me,” he finally said, his voice raspy. Fairly racked with remorse.

I reached for him, touching his arm lightly. “I want to thank you. And I want to grill your ass.”

He laughed, and the sound filled the entire store with this palpable relief. I could feel the desperation from both of us to hold on to the feeling that had been keeping me afloat the entire day—the illusion of being a normal person.

His fingers trailed up to my wrist, pushing under my jacket sleeve to touch the skin underneath, then stayed there, right on my pulse. “I don’t ever want to see you get mobbed like that again,” he said. There was so much intensity there that my blood rushed out of my head and into my toes.

Then he smiled and added, “And I get why you were so insistent on wearing that hat.”

“You only need one person to recognize you. Then the jig is up.”

“Well, we better get you a proper disguise, then.”

We flipped through some other racks of clothes, Jack pulling out one ridiculous thing after another—a sequined robe, velvet overalls, a furry skirt. I decided on a giant lavender sweatshirt instead, and handed him my coat so I could try it on.

“Has that ever happened to you before?” he asked as I pulled the sweatshirt on over my shirt.

“Has what happened before?” I said as my head popped out of the sweatshirt, hair staticky and sticking up everywhere.

“You getting swarmed.”

I nodded. “Yeah, a few times. The first couple times freaked me out so bad that I refused to leave my apartment for weeks. But the worst time was with Vivian.”

“Your sister?”

I patted my hair down. “Yeah. She was visiting me in Seoul, by herself.” It had been a big deal for my parents to send her over. The tickets were expensive and my sister was still pretty young. “We were at this amusement park, which I realize now was a bad idea. But Vivian had wanted to go so badly. And I was recognized there. It was awful. She got hurt.”

“Oh no. How?” Jack asked, holding my coat in his arms. Like a patient boyfriend shopping with his girlfriend.

The visual was too much. I looked away from it. “A fan grabbed at her and she fell forward, onto her chin. She needed stitches.”

Jack winced. “Ouch.”

Seeing Vivian’s startled face before she hit the ground was the worst moment of my life. Spending a car ride with her while she cried, clutching Ren’s rolled-up jacket to her bloody chin, was the second worst.

I nodded. “Yeah. Ouch.”

“Hey.”

I looked up at him.

He frowned, a deep groove appearing between his eyebrows. “You can’t feel guilty about stuff like that forever.”

Jack’s ability to zero in on my thoughts was unnerving.

“Easy for you to say,” I said, laughing hollowly. “There’s this thing about being famous. It shines light on people around you, but it can also hurt them.”

“With great power comes great responsibility?” he said, the corner of his mouth lifting in a sort of half smile.

Cute nerd. “Yeah … except … the power part isn’t there.” I knew how it sounded. Complainy. Ungrateful. Like, boo hoo poor little famous girl. I pulled at the sweatshirt and turned around to look in the mirror.

“I think you need some glasses,” Jack said as he looked at my reflection. I looked back at him through the mirror. He gave me a thumbs-up sign and I couldn’t help but smile.

We stood in front of a rack of plastic frames. Retro town. He turned the rack, making it creak loudly.

A pair of turquoise cat-eyes caught my eye. “Ooh, let me try those.”

I pulled them on and peered into the small mirror sitting on the counter. They were cute, but more importantly, they obscured a big chunk of my face.

“Let me see,” Jack said.

I faced him and he nodded. “Cool.”

“Don’t make some gross hot-librarian comment.”

“Excuse me. I was going to say you looked unattractive.”