“She’s somethin’,” said Van, smiling affectionately.
“That’s for sure,” said Erik, dropping his arm from her shoulders. He’d gotten used to playing boyfriend with Van over the summer and hadn’t broken himself of the habit yet, though the ruse was unnecessary now that he and Laire were over.
“I couldn’t believe it when she told me to try it on,” said Vanessa, admiring the ring still on her finger. “It was your grandmother’s, but she said someday it could be mine.”
“I heard her.” Erik gave her a sour look. “But we’re not even datin’, Van.”
“I know,” she said in a singsong voice, taking a small sip of Champagne. “But we could.”
“Didn’t I hear you were datin’ an earl?” he asked.
“Just a viscount,” she said, grinning at him, ignoring his mood. She met his eyes, holding them. “Erik, I’m not forward, but you must know . . . I’ve always had feelin’s for you.”
“I’m sorry.” He looked at her sadly. “I only see you as a friend.”
Her face lost some of its hopefulness, but she cocked her head to the side cajolingly. “I’d take my chances that could change. You could take me to the Wake Forest Winter Formal; I could be your date at Duke. We could spend some time together at Christmas break . . . see what happens.”
Over Van’s shoulder, outside on the pool deck, he saw a shadow move in the darkness, and for a second—for a split second—his heart soared, wondering if Laire had come after all. His heart stopped. His breath caught, and he lurched toward the sliding doors, placing his palms flush on the glass, staring outside at the darkness, his heart thrumming with hope.
“Erik?” asked Van, who’d followed him.
“Did you . . . did you see someone?”
“What? Outside?”
“I think I saw someone! A . . . a girl.”
“Are you crazy? It’s cold as the North Pole out there!”
Erik whipped open the door and stepped onto the pool deck, looking back and forth, but there was no one there. No boat moored at the dock. No sweet, soft girl telling him she still loved him. Nothing but the faint smell of his mother’s cigarette, black and smoky at his feet.
“I thought . . .,” he choked out, his insides twisting with disappointment. “I thought I saw . . .”
“There’s no one out here,” said Van from the doorway. “Come on back inside before you catch your death.”
She didn’t come.
She didn’t come.
It was nine o’clock on Thanksgiving night.
She wasn’t coming.
He stared out at the empty pool deck, at the empty dock, getting his ragged breathing under control. She wasn’t here and she wasn’t coming. They were over—Erik Rexford and Laire Cornish were over—and it was time for him to face the truth.
His heart was broken beyond repair, and he didn’t want to repair it. He wanted it to stay broken forever. It was the only way to protect it from ever shattering like this again. Reaching up, he pressed the palm of his hand over the broken mess of tissue and blood within, pledging to let it stay broken.
Hillary’s words returned to him: It’s time to pick up the pieces and finally move on.
Okay.
Yes, he’d move on now.
But he would never, ever let himself fall in love again. Never. If he couldn’t trust Laire, who’d seemed so earnest, so honest and true, then he couldn’t trust anyone. He turned back to the house. Stepping into the living room, he caught sight of his mother across the room, flirting with one of his father’s friends, feeling his blood run from hot and hopeful to dead and cold.
Women were deceitful and two-faced, false and dishonest.
They were executioners of hope, assassins of faith.
They could be used, as he’d been used by Laire for a summer fling, but that would be the extent of their purpose to him from now on.
From now on, he hated women.
That was Laire fucking Cornish’s goddamned Thanksgiving gift to him: a legacy of pain and destruction, a future full of hate for and distrust of the opposite sex.
“Erik?” said Van. “Did you hear me before? What do you think? About givin’ us a try? A real try?”
“What?” he asked her, looking at her with new eyes that didn’t see her as an old family friend, but as an enemy.
“How about givin’ us a try?”
“A try,” he said softly, as something once soft calcified inexorably within him, unreachable, unfixable, untouchable, dead.
“Erik?” Vanessa whispered. She scanned his face, staring at him warily, her hopeful smile fading.
He looked her body up and down with cold eyes. “No, thanks.”
***
Laire walked blindly through the night, her tears making the way blurry as the cold wind, hitting her from the Sound and the ocean, bit at her wet cheeks. Making her way to Route 12, she simply walked, aimlessly, trying to process everything she’d just seen and heard.