Page 133 of The Faking Game

“Really?”

“Yeah. If you have time.”

She rises and follows me, leaning against the pool table beside it. “I’d like that. So… how did the dinner go?”

“It went okay.”

She studies me, her eyes warm and kind. “You seem…”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m not in the best of moods.”

She sets her glass down on the velvet of the pool table and motions for me to come over. I do, draining half the glass as I go.

“Dinner didn’t go well?”

“It went,” I say. It’s the legal stuff with the house that’s infuriating. Gnaws at me like a dog with a bone.

She reaches for my shirt and pulls me forward. I brace my hands on the pool table on either side of her. “Poor West,” she says, running a hand along my cheek. “So complicated, running Calloway Holdings.”

I narrow my eyes at her. “You think you’re so funny.”

“That’s because I am.” She smiles a little. “Will you tell me something?”

“Mhm.”

Her thumb slips up, finds the edge of my eyebrow. “Will you finally tell me how you got this?”

“Finally? You’ve never asked before.”

Her teeth dig into her lower lip. “But I’ve wondered. There are a lot of things I’ve wondered about you.”

It’s dangerous, the game we’re playing now. Dangerous because it doesn’t feel like a game at all. Her finger brushes along my eyebrow. “It was a fight,” I say.

“With who?”

I breathe her in, and it’s soap and perfume and whiskey. “The fifth guy we spoke about the other night.”

“Who used to live in that house. Who went to Belmont with you and the guys.”

“You werefriends.” Her finger smooths down my cheek. “Until he hurt you?”

“Until he hurt all of us.” His father ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Millions of dollars lost, a public trial, the storied family drawn through the mud. All of our families lost money, and Hadrian told us he’d known about all of it. That the friendships were all false. “And he fooled around with Amber.”

Her touch stills. “Oh.”

“Sisters are off-limits. They’ve always been off-limits.” It was one of the things we agreed on almost fifteen years ago, five boys in a dorm room in wrinkled prep school uniforms and a window cracked open for the smoke.

When it all happened… The fight was bad. Hadrian was expelled. Left Belmont and our lives, and it was years before I saw him again.

At the time, Amber insisted that what happened wasn’t wrong. That he liked her and she liked him. But that was before we found out the friendships had been a ruse.

“That’s not fair.” Nora runs her hand down, finds the nape of my neck. “Don’t the sisters in this equation get a say?”

“Rafe would still see it as a betrayal.”

“He wouldn’t end your friendship. You’re like his family.”

I look down at the silky fabric barely covering her, and I’m angry, and frustrated, and half hard again. I’ve never liked things I can’t control, and right now there’s almost nothing in my life that I can.

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