The Lie(65)

“Quite the date,” he says after, as we walk back to the car.

“Quite the date,” I agree.

We get in and speed back to the lights of London.





CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Natasha

London

Four Years Ago




“Still haven’t heard from him, huh?” Melissa asks as we sit at the bar, pints of beer in our hands. I’ve barely been eating all week, so a pint of Guinness is as close to a meal as I’m going to have. It’s just impossible to have an appetite when my stomach is churning with nerves, my heart fizzing like a freshly lit firecracker. Ever since Brigs told me that he loved me, my life has been turned upside down in the most gorgeous, unruly way.

But, naturally, Melissa doesn’t approve.

Why would anyone approve of Brigs and me?

I give her an innocent look as I delicately sip my beer. “What makes you say that?”

She rolls her eyes, brushing her hair out of her face. “Because your eyes keep drifting away and you’re not listening to a word I’m saying.”

“That’s not true,” I tell her, pointing the beer at her. “You were just saying how I ought to give Billy the Skid another chance.”

“Well, you should,” she says. “First of all, yes you said he was a sloppy kisser, but that doesn’t mean the sex will suck. Besides, you hooked up with him before the summer. Things might have changed by now.”

When she says before the summer, I know she’s reminding me of how I was before I met Brigs. But everything I was before him doesn’t seem to matter now. Especially not William Squire, who couldn’t sound more British if he tried, a guy from my class that I had a date with but felt absolutely no chemistry. Kissing him was like kissing a very wet, slimy wall. If that wall had long hair and a love of 80s rocker Sebastian Bach. And of course when I didn’t go out with him again, he immediately starting dating someone else from our class. You’d think grad school would be miles away from high school, but some people just can’t f*cking grow up.

“Maybe,” I say, my noncommittal answer.

“You know what you’re doing with Brigs is wrong, don’t you?” she says so simply it makes my chin jerk back.

“I’m not doing anything with Brigs,” I tell her in a hush.

“Right. And that’s why when I showed up at your door, he was there. He stayed the night. You told me he kissed you.”

I swallow hard, my cheeks flashing with shame. “I didn’t sleep with him.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “He’s married. He belongs with his wife. Not you. I don’t care if you say they have a strained marriage, that he doesn’t love her. He’s scum and he’s playing you like some dumb young American.”

I shake my head. I look away, blinking fast. Fear leads to tears. “You don’t know him or his life or what he’s been through or what I’ve been through.”

She scoffs and takes a large gulp of her beer. “You can’t have everything, Natasha. That’s not how life works.”

I stare at her blankly. “I don’t have everything.”

“Yes you do,” she says with a bitter laugh. “You grew up in this fabulous house in LA, spent your youth modeling and acting.”

“My mother is insane! If you met her, you wouldn’t say that!”

She ignores me. “You have these guys fawning over you in your class, you’re smart, you have a father in France, a big deal cinematographer on top of it, you look like a f*cking movie star, and now you have some handsome married guy wanting to leave his wife for you. No, sorry, but you can’t have that. It’s wrong. You need to let him go and just accept that some things are not meant to be. Chemistry is everything, but timing is the real bitch. This is not your time. For once in your life, it’s not your time.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. It’s not so much about Brigs, it’s that Melissa has these preconceived notions about me, none of them being true. I mean, not in the light she’s painting me.

“Everyone’s lives look different from the outside,” I say quietly. “But the truth is there if you’re willing to believe it.”

“Whatever,” she says dismissively. “You know I’m right. As your friend, I have to tell you that going after a married man is pretty low, and the sooner you move on and think about guys your own age, the ones who are available, then you’ll have something to be genuinely happy about.”

Ouch. Fucking ouch. But I’m not surprised, not entirely. It’s just impossible to explain Brigs and me to anyone. If it wasn’t for Melissa seeing him that morning, I wouldn’t have said anything to her at all.

Am I ashamed? I don’t know. Not of how I feel for him. And not of how he feels for me. I just know it’s not the kind of thing to ever be proud of. Love is something I always thought of in terms of black and white—you loved someone or you didn’t. If you loved them, it was good. How could love be anything but?

But now I’m living in all the shades of grey. How love can lift you up and make you fall all at once. Brigs makes me feel both pure and dirty, carefree and guilty. I can tell myself too, over and over again, that we didn’t have a choice in this, at least I didn’t, but I couldn’t have shut off those feelings any easier than it is to stop breathing.