Page 7 of Gilded Fake

I used to tell her not to make things worse, but how can things get worse? I let my mask slip, and she saw. My heart stutters in my chest, and I can barely breathe.

She knows.

“Gross,” says the dance girl, giving Harper a dirty look. “And I’m with Duke, so…” She gives us a haughty look.

“And?” Harper asks.

“Obviously he knows what he’s doing,” the girl huffs, clearly pissed Harper’s not impressed with her Dolce girl status. “Ask the skank beside you.”

The answer is on the tip of my tongue, programmed into me after so many years of defending and talking up the D-boys while being discrete and ladylike at the same time, so as never to reflect poorly on my own family. The Dolces value class above even beauty.

But I am not their puppet any longer.

“Can’t recall,” I say with a shrug. “It didn’t make an impression. Then again, so many people have licked my pussy since then, it’s hard to remember one man from the next.”

“Ugh, let’s get out of here before we catch something,” says a voice from the stall, and my sister emerges, fixing her skirt. She barely glances at us, as if she doesn’t know me at all.

“Dixie’s right about you,” says the other girl at the mirror, who’s been watching our exchange. “You were never fit to be in the elite. You’re trash, just like her.”

She nods to Harper, who makes an obscene gesture with her tongue and two fingers.

“Oh my god,” Eleanor shrieks, grabbing her friends. “Let’s get out of here before they assault us. Were they looking under the stall at me?”

They leave, and Harper rolls her eyes and shakes her head. “God, how did you ever like those girls?”

“Well, one of them is my sister, so it’s not like I had much choice,” I say. “And it’s different when you’re part of it. You want to go along, to belong.”

“Yeah, I get it,” she admits, leaning back against the sink and resting her hands beside her hips. “But anyway, now that we’re alone… Spill.”

She wiggles her brows at me and grins, and I can’t stop the smile from creeping onto my face no matter how hard I try to hold it back. I’ve kept this secret for so long, and it makes me giddy with excitement as well as fear now that someone finally knows. It’s a relief to tell someone, to spill the entire story, and Harper’s the only person I trust enough to tell. So, I do.

Starting with the game of hide-and-seek, and how it led us to realizing that I was the girl he’d been looking for since the night in the pool house, and he was the boy I had made sure to never look for since that same night. And how we said it was a fluke, and then we tested it, and we found out it was a hundred other things, but never a fluke.

And since I’m being honest, and she’s a better friend than I have any right to have, I tell her something I can barely admit to myself. That I couldn’t forget, even when he had, and I couldn’t move on, even when he didn’t know there was anything to move on from. Because I love him.

I’ve loved him for a long time.

Even when I couldn’t show it, couldn’t let myself so much as think it, I loved him. And once I didn’t have to worry about the Dolces torturing or killing him, it was better, but it was also worse, because I was the only person stopping me from doing the unthinkable. He makes me so weak that some days I thought I was going to just blurt it out, that he’d strip away all the gilded lies and expose me, and instead of the Dolces being there to see, it would be him—or Dixie.

When I finish, I drop my head into my hands in defeat. “I don’t know what to do.”

“I think you do.”

“He must know,” I say miserably. “I barely keep it together when he’s around. You saw me. I can’t hide it.”

“You have to tell him.”

“If someone bothers to look, they’ll know, and trust me, he’s looked. He could have me if he wanted me, and he damn well knows it. Which means he doesn’t want me.”

“I wasn’t talking about that.”

“You don’t have the right to tell someone how you feel when you already know they don’t feel the same,” I point out. “Especially if it might fuck up their perfectly happy relationship. He doesn’t love me, Harper. He loves Dixie.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. “You have to tell him what you just told me. Not the love part. You have to tell him what happened last year. He deserves the truth.”

“I told him,” I whisper. “Yesterday. But what if he didn’t want to remember? What if he hates me for it?”

“He might,” she admits. “But you did the right thing. He has a right to know what happened to him.”

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