Complete Nothing (True Love #2)(69)

I sank down next to her and mimicked her pose, reaching for one toe and then the other, trying to figure out why I suddenly felt so uncertain. Was it that I didn’t think Keegan wanted to come, or was it that I didn’t think I wanted him to come? Part of me felt like dance recitals were for families, friends, boyfriends. People who truly mattered. People who would appreciate my hard work and sweat and tears. Did Keegan fit that bill?

“Good evening, class!” Madame Helene called out, emerging from her office. She walked over to her iPod and switched it on. The opening strains of her usual warm-up music flowed from the speakers. The class scrambled to its feet. “To the barre, please?”

We scurried noiselessly to the barres along two adjacent sides of the room and began our drills. I breathed in and out as I lowered into plié after plié, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Keegan. About how I would ask him. About what he would say. But every once in a while, Peter’s face would creep into my thoughts. His voice would sound in my ear, asking . . .

You’re really going to ask that tool over me? You really want him there and not me?

I remembered the expression of pride on Peter’s face after The Nutcracker last year, the one show he’d been able to attend. How he’d kissed me on the forehead and handed me a single red rose. How he’d pulled me close and whispered in my ear, “I told everyone in my row that you were my girl. I couldn’t stop smiling.”

I felt sick, suddenly. Sick and hot and tearful. How could he have said that to me then, but not want to be with me now? What had changed? What had I done wrong?

What I wouldn’t give to hear him say that to me again.

But it didn’t matter. Because he was never going to come to another of my recitals. I was with Keegan now. And I liked Keegan. He was laid-back. He was chill. He was so easy to laugh and let everything roll off his shoulders. There was so much about Keegan that I liked. Not the potential sexting, but everything else.

Lauren was right. I should ask him to our recital. I just hoped he liked me enough to say yes.





CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN


True


I walked into the house after an insane shift at Goddess Cupcakes that night, tense from spending the entire walk home looking over my shoulder, waiting for Artemis and Apollo to jump out from behind a car or a potted plant or a Dumpster and slay me. I locked both locks behind me and let out a massive breath. The house was quiet. I glanced down the hallway toward Hephaestus’s room, and the crack under the door was dark. My mother would just be leaving the mall now, having been on the closing shift at Perfumania. I had plenty of time to do what I needed to do.

Heart pounding from side to side and back to front, I raced upstairs and into my room, closing the door silently behind me. At my desk, I placed Wallace’s hand-me-down computer next to the sand timer, which was getting ominously low. So ominously low, I felt as if I could hear every last grain of sand hitting the growing pile at the bottom of the hourglass, sliding down the hill and hitting the thick sides. I pulled my sweater off and tossed it over the thing. Right now, I needed to concentrate.

“Please work, please work, please work.”

I opened the computer and turned it on, sitting down and kicking my shoes off as it booted up. Then I opened the camera program like Wallace had taught me to do back at the library and clicked open the screen marked “Recorded Footage.” There was seven hours, thirteen minutes, and forty-two seconds of it.

“Yes,” I said under my breath.

Salivating, I moved my finger over the touch pad—I now knew it was called a touch pad—and clicked the triangle that, I’d also learned today, meant “play.”

The footage began. Hephaestus’s room was empty and still. And it continued to be empty and still for a good fifteen minutes until I finally remembered that he’d worked a shift at the garage right after school today, and I hit the double triangle button, which meant “fast-forward.”

I sat back and watched the unchanging screen. The only evidence of the passage of time were the minute movements of the leaves on the trees outside his window, fluttering now and then in the breeze. Finally, once I’d scrolled through three hours plus of the same thing, the door opened, and Hephaestus entered. I sat forward like a shot and hit play again.

Hephaestus hoisted his book bag onto his bed, then wheeled over to the window. He used a metal hook to reach up and lower the shade. My heart skipped in excitement. This was it. This had to be it.

Then he started undressing. I gulped. Hephaestus tugged off his jacket and hung it in the closet, then pulled his T-shirt off over his head. That was when I started to sweat.

Hephaestus had the single most perfect torso I had ever seen on a human being. There were muscles everywhere. Big, defined ones. And his arms were sinewy and strong, bulging whenever he moved. I could see a tattoo on his left pectoral muscle, just above his heart, and I leaned in for a better look, but then he turned and pushed his chair into the bathroom.

Five minutes later, the shower came on, and it was more fast-forwarding until, finally, he emerged in a clean T-shirt and jeans, looking refreshed. He pulled his books from his bag and brought them over to his desk.

Great. Now I was going to watch the guy do his homework? I was just about to hit fast-forward again, when his head popped up and he looked at the mirror. My eyes darted to it as well. The frame was glowing.