Page 46 of Gilded Fake

I can’t help but laugh. “Fine, that was a stretch. But I held my own. I may not have your experience, but I’m not some pushover. I don’t go down without a fight.”

“So don’t.”

I search her baby blue eyes as if I can read the answers there. “What do you mean?” I ask at last, my throat tight and my pulse racing.

She shrugs and stands to go back in. “I mean, when you find something worth fighting for, you’ll fight for it.”

eleven

1.5 YEARS AGO

Gloria Walton

I sat on my closet floor in the dark, staring at the number on my phone. My thumb hovered over it. I knew I shouldn’t call, but I needed to talk to someone. My sisters would never understand—they kept asking what’s wrong, why I’d been moping around all week. They’d finally laid off when I told them it was because Royal went off with Harper last weekend. If they’d bothered to look, they would’ve seen through that excuse.

Eleanor was going to shoot her shot with him that night, even though I told her not to. Not because I wanted him, but because she actually had a crush on him, and I knew better than anyone that letting your heart get involved was a bad idea where the Dolce boys were concerned. But it was always a good cover story when someone asked me what was wrong, and my sisters were just self-absorbed enough not to question it.

It wasn’t like I could tell Dawson, either. He’d have been furious that I did anything disloyal to Royal. If there was anyone with their nose further up the Dolce boys’ asses than my sisters, it was my brother.

I let my head fall back against the closet wall and squeezed my phone in my hand. I shouldn’t even have been considering this. A good friend would walk away. A good person would delete his number.

But I was not a good person. I wasn’t sure I was even a real person. I was a mirror ball, each tiny surface reflecting back what each different person wanted to see. It had been so long since someone asked me what I wanted that I didn’t think I could answer if they did.

Or maybe I could.

Maybe I’d want to wear a black leather jacket and smoky eye makeup to school, get a tattoo, and smoke a cigarette without someone giving me a lecture on what kind of person would indulge such a filthy habit. I’d like to step over the wall that had always separated me and Royal, tell him all the truths I couldn’t tell anyone else, and maybe he’d understand because he was the closest thing to a real friend I had and the only person at Willow Heights who was more fake than I was. Maybe I’d hang out with the girl who threw a roach in my face and dared to fight the head bitch at school on her very first week.

If I called her now, she’d ask what the fuck I was after. Royal sent me after her on Monday, when they took her to the basement for the first time, to make sure she was okay. That gave me the chance to apologize for the shit I put her through on their behalf and give her some tips for surviving the Dolces, but it wasn’t like we were besties.

I sighed and scrolled through my phone, as if I could find a friend that didn’t exist. I worked so hard to be the perfect girl, the girl who was exactly what everyone wanted, that I was about to crack under the pressure and become the girl no one wanted.

I wished Rylan were here. I missed him, missed the simplicity of life in Savannah, before my dad was a crook and my survival depended on appeasing a bunch of maniacs. I missed being able to be myself, with only the usual pressures to please my parents and fit in.

Here, I’d felt like that for only one moment, as if I’d been cut free of all the ties and obligations and demands. One morning where I thought about only myself, where I was selfish and let myself feel good without worrying about my survival or even my reputation.

I typed in the numbers with shaking fingers, repeating them in my mind, memorizing them. For a while, it was enough just to look at them. But then I heard my sisters giggling and shrieking over something, and Dawson yelling down the hall that he was going out with the guys, and I hit the call button.

“Hello?”

My heart flipped in my chest, and suddenly, I could barely breathe. What was I doing?

“Hello,” he said again, and I could hear the impatience, imagine him about to hang up and toss the phone aside.

“Hey,” I said quietly, barely above a whisper.

I should hang up, I thought. Pretend it was a misdial. This wasn’t like me. I didn’t do reckless things, didn’t act without thinking through the next ten moves and all the possible consequences of each.

“Who is this?” He sounded guarded, suspicious. Of course he did. He didn’t know who was calling, didn’t have my number saved in his phone.

“It’s me,” I said. “Your… Butterfly.”

There was a long silence, though I could hear muffled background noises, like he was moving around. Then he spoke again. “Why are you calling me?”

“I didn’t want to text,” I said. “Too much of a paper trail. You can just erase a call from your call log when we hang up.”

“I meant more like, how’d you get my number?”

“Oh,” I said, feeling stupider by the second. He obviously didn’t want to talk to me. Of course he didn’t. We’d left things on bad terms. “From Maverick.”

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