Page 96 of The Ruse

The familiar pucker line formed between her eyebrows for a moment before she seemed to understand. “Was this…” Her eyes narrowed as they searched my face. “Was this Bailee’s room then?”

“Yeah.” I glanced around the room again. At the photos and art Elyse and Ava had hung on the walls. To the pink curtains that framed the two large windows. The string lights they had hung near the ceiling. “It looks completely different. But yeah, this was her room last year.”

Bailee hadn’t had a roommate, since she liked her privacy and her parents could afford the extra rate to turn what was meant to be a double room into a single. There had been a couch and a mini fridge in the place where Ava’s bed now sat. And both closets were stocked to the brim with designer outfits.

I’d heard Ava was into fashion and design, taking after the twins’ mom. But from what I could see of the closet that I assumed was hers, it had nothing on Bailee Vanderbilt’s closet. Bailee had an outfit for every occasion and rarely wore the same thing twice.

Elyse gazed around the room as if seeing it with new eyes. With a frown, she asked, “Is it weird that no one told us this was her room?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “The school likes to switch things up and put students in different halls every year, so the people staying in this hall now probably didn’t even know it was hers.”

Bailee had been very popular and had collected a lot of fans to her fan club, but she’d always kept them at a distance. I doubted she’d even invited many people besides me into her sanctuary.

“So…you said you spent a lot of time in here?” Elyse asked, sounding curious of what kinds of things we’d done together.

I’d told her at the cabin that I’d never shared a bed with a girl before, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t get up to mischief during the day if the door was closed and no one knew I was in here.

Since I didn’t want Elyse to assume Bailee and I had been more intertwined than we really were, I said, “We mostly did homework or talked.”

Bailee always found ways to sneak me in when Heather wasn’t watching, and then we’d just talk and laugh about all the things we’d done that day to make people think we were so in love with each other.

“So I haven’t been sleeping on a bed where you…” She drifted off when she glanced at the bed behind her with a purple comforter.

“No.” I shook my head. “Like I said at the cabin, we weren’t like that.” I cleared my throat and rubbed the back of my neck, deciding now was the time to come clean. “We, um, we were actually just friends.”

“What?” Elyse looked confused. “What do you mean you were just friends?”

“Well…” I pressed my lips together, trying to figure out the best way to explain. Then with a shrug, I said, “We were just acting like we were a couple the whole time. Our relationship was all just a big ruse that Bailee came up with for her own entertainment.”

She’d gotten such a huge kick out of it, like it filled some sort of need she had to always be on display and yet untouchable to everyone around her. She wanted people to think they knew her, without having them actually know anything.

She’d been especially delighted when the teachers bought it—loved it when the biology and chemistry professor Owen replaced, Mr. Hicks, would get after us for flirting too much in his class. It was like a little game to her, to see just how far she could push his buttons before he would split us up and make her sit in the front row and me in the back.

“Wait.” Elyse sat down on the edge of her bed and started unbuttoning her wool coat. “Are you saying that you weren’t actually boyfriend and girlfriend?”

“Not in the sense that everyone believed, no.” I slid down the door so I could sit on the floor. “We were in what I guess most people would call a ‘fake relationship.’”

“Seriously?” Her mouth hung open, and she looked like she was searching for words. “Are you saying that all this time I’ve been feeling bad that you lost this girl who you were madly in love with… All the times I felt so sorry that you were suspected of hurting the love of your life…” She scrunched up her nose, betrayal obvious in her expression. “And none of it was even real?” She scoffed in disgust. “Did you even miss her? Or was all of that just an act as well?”

And those questions right there were exactly why I hadn’t told anyone about any of this. Because it made me look bad.

Really, really bad.

All the lies. All the pretending. The deceit.

Maybe Ava and Elyse had been right.

Maybe I really was abad boy.

“It looks pretty bad, doesn’t it?” I said.

She nodded. “Yeah.” She pulled her coat off, revealing the rest of her dress that I’d been so curious about. It was sleeveless, with a high neckline that tapered in like an apron—only with scalloped edges and way sexier than an apron.

She stood and hung her coat on a hanger in the closet to my right. Then she kicked off the high-heeled black boots she’d been wearing.

She turned back to me and said, “So, has anything you’ve told me about yourself even been real?” She pursed her lips and seemed to mull over what she’d just said. Then with a contemplative look, she said, “Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t know if you’ve told me that much about yourself. I know you’re from Eden Falls and grew up on the same road as Nash, and that you lived with the Carmichaels in Ridgewater. But I still have no idea about your mom and why your brother has custody of you.”

She was right. I hadn’t told her a whole lot about myself and my past. Nothing super important, really.

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