Act Your Age, Eve Brown (The Brown Sisters #3)(54)

“When it became something that matters, which—oh, look, it hasn’t.”

“Eve,” he said, “everything about you matters.” And then he briefly but seriously considered ripping out his own tongue.





Chapter Thirteen


Everything about you matters.

Eve might have fainted—might have swooned into a pile of dust, kind of like she did when she reached the romantic declaration part of her favorite horny fanfics—if it weren’t for the rest of Jacob’s little speech.

“We’re friends now,” he said. “Friends share, correct?”

Ah. Yes. Friendship. That was how she’d ended up lying in bed beside him under a gorgeous night sky, her skin fizzing with the electricity of his quiet, contained nearness and her mind veering into forbidden territory every five minutes. Friendship. Obviously. Hm.

“It didn’t seem relevant,” she said at last. “So I like to sing. You know that. What else is there?”

“You can’t tell me,” he said, “that it’s not important to you. When you sing like that. It has to be important to you.”

She knew what he meant. People had their things, right? You could be shitty at this or that, but everyone had at least one thing, and they loved their thing, and they were proud of their thing. She’d been proud of her thing, too, until she’d tried to make it her life and failed. Now it was just . . . there. Part of her, a pleasure, but a reminder, too, when she was in the worst of her moods.

Whatever Jacob read in her silence, or saw in her face, it made him shake his head and put a hand on her shoulder. That hand seemed so heavy, so hot, she was surprised it didn’t slide right through her bones like a knife through butter. “Don’t,” he said.

“Don’t what?”

“Whatever you’re thinking. Don’t. There isn’t much that takes the smile out of you like this, so whatever’s on your mind can’t be good.”

His words were a soft and tender shock, bare of all sarcasm or dry critique, like he’d taken off his clothes just to show her his naked skin. Like maybe he was waiting for her to do the same.

Not that this topic was half so serious as her melodramatic mind always made it out to be. As proof of that fact—for him, for herself—she huffed a sigh and stared at the stars as she spoke. “I used to think I would perform. Always, you know? That it would be my future. Because I was so good—everyone swore I was good—so that had to be my destiny. But good isn’t all it takes. Especially when you look like me.”

“You look perfect,” he said, the words quick and razor-sharp with their certainty. They caught her unawares, like a flash of lightning in the dark. When she turned her head to look at him, he wasn’t blushing or figuring out how to take it back. He was watching her steadily, as if he’d known she’d instantly try to poke holes in his statement, and he refused to let her. “You look perfect,” he said again, each word falling like a petal onto a tranquil lake.

She smiled, then, because he deserved it. And a little bit because . . . well, because he seemed to mean it, which fluffed her up inside like cotton candy.

Jacob Wayne thought she was perfect.

And, beneath all the barbed-wire keep-your-distance ice-god bullshit, she thought there was no one sweeter in all the world than him.

“Thank you,” she said. “But you realize plenty of other people disagree.”

“I don’t give a fuck about other people.”

“Neither do I,” she said honestly. When it came to her appearance, Eve had long since learned that giving a shit about others’ opinions meant slipping under an ocean of negativity. So she’d decided a while back that she was beautiful, and her body was lovely, and she would accept no other judgment on the subject. “But I used to. Back when I wanted to be the star of the show so badly, I cared a lot. You see, I was always rather shit at school. I was slow on the uptake and I didn’t test well and my memory—let’s not even talk about it. So I told myself, you know, it didn’t matter, because I wasn’t meant for that sort of thing. I was meant to be a star. I got so convinced that I just stopped trying. I was never going to be smart like my sisters, and I was never going to need it, so I might as well give up.

“But then I finished secondary, and my parents sent me to a performing arts college, and I wasn’t . . . I wasn’t the best. I’d convinced myself I just had to wait, and I’d eventually be the best at something. But I’d been wrong. I didn’t hit the right emotional marks, and my memory issue was a problem, script-wise, and I was terrible at being told what to do. And then, on top of it all, there was the look.” She pressed her lips together and flicked a glance at Jacob because, well, this part was so excruciatingly awkward to speak about. Some people wanted to pretend they didn’t understand, as if her prettiness negated all the other things she was, and all the ways those other things didn’t fit in with society’s expectations.

Then there were the people who acted like it shouldn’t hurt, being rejected by the status quo like that. As if, because it came from a twisted place of inequality, it shouldn’t have any hold on her. Which was a nice idea in principle, but Eve found it mostly came from those who’d never been personally crushed by the weight of all that disapproval.