Chapitre 13: chapter 13
Just to pass a Mustang and switch lanes. Putting distance between me and the paparazzi. As I decelerate, Farell drops his arm to the middle console.
Done typing, he says, "Silicone-based lube feels better than water-based."
I glance at him. Just once. "I've never tried it."
He keeps his hand to his mouth. What does that mean?
I start glancing to the road. To him, the road, him, and I realize—he's smiling. When I catch his expression, he lets his hand fall, his lips stretched so wide, and he shifts in his seat and hunches forward as he types out something on my phone.
"What are you doing?"
He turns his head to me, and bleach-white strands of hair slip to his lashes. "Writing down my favorite lube for you, wolf scout."
I flex my abs to stop from hardening. Dear World, I hate you. Worst regards, a human being who's trying not to bust a nut.
"Cool," I say as he passes me my phone. Yeah, so cool. Let my childhood-crush-also-turned-bodyguard pick out my lube for me. That will make not fantasizing about him so much easier.
So smart of me.
Genius.
Maybe I shouldn't have dropped out of Harvard.
*****
Six months ago, Jane Cobalt rushed into my room at midnight. Face covered in an avocado mask. Brunette hair twisted in a pink towel.
"Max?" she whispered.
I hadn't fallen asleep yet. At the spike of her breezy voice, I flipped on my lamp fast. And Janie saw the girl nestled beneath my covers. Buck-naked. Both of us.
Jane winced. "Désolée. Ça n'a pas d'importance." So sorry. It doesn't matter. She started to leave.
I whispered with urgency, "Attends." Wait. I hurried out of bed and tugged on boxer-briefs. "Jane." I sprinted to the door, and my one-night stand groggily said my name. I assured her, "I'll be right back."
I left my door ajar so she'd be less inclined to take pictures of my bedroom.
Jane waited for me in the middle of the staircase. At the top, Declan played a game on his cellphone—he'd been guarding my room that night. My bodyguard gave me a colossal amount of figurative space. Barely acknowledging me.
"Jane?" I stopped one stair above hers.
"Go back," she emphasized. "I didn't mean to interrupt you. I just had a sudden…" With two hands, she motioned to her body and outward. Jane was rarely lost for words.
My brows knotted and I shook my head repeatedly. "You had a creature come loose through your small intestines?" Alright, I wasn't used to Janie miming.
Her tiny smile pulled at her avocado mask. "And you still question why you're never picked first for charades."
Alright, that too.
She inhaled. "I had a sudden…épiphanie." Epiphany.
"About what?" I stood like a stone statue. She's moving out. My sudden guess stabbed my lungs.
We'd been together since birth. Inseparable as kids and teenagers. In Philly, there weren't laundry lists of actors and celebrities to shirk attention from ourselves. We weren't in LA or New York. Our families were the only shiny toys in the window. The only animals in the zoo.
Growing up in the public eye here, we related to very few people. So we naturally stuck together. As an adult, it always felt like we were supposed to move on somehow—but I never understood why that meant we had to move on from each other.
I wanted Janie in my world. And she was the one who said those three months we separated at college—I went to Harvard, she went to Princeton—were the "darkest, most miserable days" of her life.
After a quick glance at my cracked door, she murmured, "An epiphany about my future. Midnight life contemplations, you know those."
I did. When we were sixteen, we used to sneak into the Meadows girls' treehouse at night and talk for hours about our identities. Our role in the world.
Who we were. Inside. And out.
Our attention drifted as two calico kittens skulked up the stairs. She picked up Walrus and let his brother Carpenter scamper away. Jane owned five cats: Walrus, Carpenter, Toodles, Ophelia, and Lady Macbeth. I never minded them or even the strays she sometimes housed.
They made Janie happy.
"I can't do philanthropy for much longer," she said after a short pause.
That.
Too many emotions hit me at once, so I knocked them aside. And a heavy nothingness weighed me down.
Since she was eighteen, Jane had been the temporary CFO for H.M.C. Philanthropies. I tried to prepare myself for the day she'd leave, but I let the idea wither and die in my brain.
She'd be by my side forever.
Except forever always ends.
"It's almost been three years, Max." She tried to kiss Walrus without avocado-ing his calico fur. Then he sprung out of her arms. "Charity work is just supposed to be my pit stop. It's what you're good at. It's what you desperately love." She said the word love from her core. "But me—"
"You don't have to convince me. I know it's not your thing." I wish it could've been, but I wouldn't selfishly beg her to stay.
Because out of loyalty, she would. And I wasn't going to trap my best friend.
Jane lowered her voice to another whisper. "We're all incredibly privileged, and the thought of wasting a moment or any opportunity we've been given feels like eternal failure."
"No," I snapped, concerned about where this was headed.
"It's true." She tried hard not to scratch her face. But her mask must've itched because she kept crinkling her nose. She tilted her chin up and looked me right in the eye. "I can't sit idly by and be the woman no one hoped I'd be."
My jaw tensed. "You put way too much fucking pressure on yourself." All of the girls I was surrounded by did, and it had a lot, in part, to do with the media placing impossible ideals on them.
Before they even hit puberty, they were supposed to be role models, advocates, successful, beautiful, fierce, strong, humble, and sweet—when all I ever wanted for each of them was to be happy.
"Let me preface," Jane said, "my epiphany has nothing to do with math."
"Good."
État de l’alimentation hebdomadaire
-- Classement
Power Stone 
-- Power
stone