Well Played (Well Met #2)(44)
“How did that backpack work out for you?”
“Oh, it’s wonderful!” I was so pleased she’d remembered selling it to me last summer. It had been an impulse buy to assuage my sadness at the end of the season, but it had become one of my favorite souvenirs. Every time I looked at it and used it, I was reminded of these trees, and how I felt during these weeks. It reminded me that this was my favorite time of the year, every year.
But this time . . . Daniel’s presence lurked at the edges, like storm clouds waiting to blot out the summer sun. All I’d wanted was to clear the air between us, and maybe move forward, but instead he’d just . . . walked away. I’d started at least three texts to Emily last night about the whole thing when I’d gotten home but had erased them all. I’d see her this morning, and talking was better than texting when it came to things like this.
Now that I was alongside my castmates, I pulled my hair up and tied a kerchief over it so it looked oh-so-carefully casual. Then I loosened the strings on my corset as far as they’d go and went looking for Emily. Once she strapped me in, my transformation into Beatrice the seventeenth-century tavern wench would be complete. I’d missed Beatrice, and I was looking forward to being her again.
Em was five minutes late, which for her was right on time. How she managed to do that while living with a control freak of a fiancé was beyond me, but there you were. It was also possible that Simon slept on the Faire grounds once it was this time of year . . . he was pretty attached to it. The idea of the fastidious Simon living in a tent was so ridiculous that the smile was still on my face when Emily found me. But when I saw her my smile fell. I’d been looking all over for her blue and white wench’s costume, but here she was with an underskirt the color of deep wine, and the dress over it a dark black. The corset she’d fastened around her middle was a dark wine color the same shade as her underskirt. She’d gone and changed her costume, and here I was in the same old thing.
Why was everyone else able to seek out change while I let everything remain the same?
But before I could ask her about her new outfit, she hurried over to me and grabbed my arms. “Did you talk to him? How did it go?”
I blinked as my brain switched topics. “Daniel? Oh, yeah.” I folded my arms over my chest. “I talked to him last night when he got into town.” My flat tone of voice did a pretty good job of letting her know how that went.
“Ohhh.” Her eyebrows climbed her forehead as she drew the word out. “It really was Daniel writing to you all this time?” I gave her a tight nod, and her hopeful expression faded quickly. “So I take it things didn’t go well?”
“No. Not at all.” I filled her in on what had happened the night before. How I had hoped that after Daniel and I had talked, there would be a fresh start between us. A new beginning. But his response had been an apology and a closed door. An ending. “But it’s okay,” I said after I’d brought her up to speed. I tried to give her a helpless, what are you gonna do? shrug and my usual smile, but neither one of them really fit right.
And Emily wasn’t buying it for a second. “But he’s been writing to you for months. Months. You’ve been getting to know each other better than anyone else, right? And the second he’s confronted with the truth, he just throws up his hands all ‘Welp, you caught me’? That’s it?”
“Well . . .” When she put it like that . . .
“You’d think he’d try to fight for you. At least a little.” She shook her head. “That’s disappointing.”
“I guess he didn’t want to.” A sense of loss swept through me, which was strange. How could I lose what had never been mine? But despite everything, I didn’t want to believe that this was it. That after all these months, what Daniel and I had had together was over, as if it had never happened. That didn’t seem right either.
My shrug and smile were slightly more successful this time. It was long past time to change the subject. “Anyway. I have two questions for you.”
“Okay, shoot.” She turned her back to me. “Tighten me up?”
“First off, when did you get this outfit?” I started at the top, working my way to the middle of the corset, pulling on the laces until the corset was fully closed in the back and the dress underneath was completely covered.
“A week or two ago.” She threw a quizzical glance over her shoulder. “I sent the link to you, remember?”
“Well, yeah, but I didn’t know you’d actually ordered it.” I tugged on the laces from the bottom of the corset and moved up, meeting in the middle and tying it off. “Okay, the other question. Did Simon approve it?”
“Do you think I gave him a choice?” She grinned and turned back around, and something in my expression made her face fall a little. “I’m sorry. I really thought you knew I was getting a new outfit. I thought you were too.”
I shrugged as she started gathering the black overdress up, pinning it up at her hip as I’d taught her to do during her first year of Faire so that the deep red skirt underneath showed. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve been a little preoccupied lately.” That was putting it mildly.
“What do you think?” Her expression was uncertain as she shifted around in the new outfit, which was understandable. It was a departure from her wench’s outfit, that was for sure. The corset was tighter, the colors were bolder.