Page 71 of Caught in a Bad Fauxmance
“None,” he replies quickly.
“Lies of omission are still lies.” If my righteous Catholic abuela taught me anything, it’s that keeping secrets and telling lies hold the same weight.
He doesn’t have a response for that, and I’ve heard enough anyway. He stays on the floor, kneeling beside the mess as Ipick myself up. When I cross to the door, he leaps back into action, standing so quickly he nearly loses his balance.
“You and Maya were doing the same thing. That’s why you were here. To look through our stuff.”
I don’t want to stop moving until I’m back in my room and under my covers, but I freeze, still unwilling to face him. “How do you know that?”
“Every time you came over, she’d blow up your phone asking if you found any dirt yet.” A bitter edge to his voice. “You weren’t exactly discreet.”
I know how it must come across, but my heart knows there’s a difference. That he chose to hurt me, and I pushed away my own sister just so I wouldn’t have to do the same to him. “It wasn’t my idea, and I didn’t want to do it.”
“But you still did.”
Finally, I turn to him.
The pain dulls as rage takes over. “And I ended it!” I shout, the picture frames on the wall beside us rattling. “Yousawme protect you instead of taking her side, and you still thought I was going to turn against you?”
My chest heaves as I pause for breath, launching into a new tirade before he can respond.
“And is that really so unfair? Trying to catch you doing something you shouldn’t have been doing in the first place? All we wanted was to keep it fair this year, that’s it. We bet our fucking cabin on this. Can you blame us for trying to save the last place where we have happy memories with our mom from being turned into your dad’s goddamn boat garage?”
I lean down to grab a handful of paper from the pilebetween us, waving it in Julian’s face. “Thisis different.” My eyes sting, tears clouding my vision, but I will myself not to cry. Not yet, not in front of him. “You wanted to hurt us. Hurtme.And you didn’t care.”
“Of course I cared.” His voice cracks on the last syllable. “We didn’t know. About the bet, at first, I swear. When you mentioned it that night at the pier, I called off the plan. That’s…” He trails off, composes himself, then starts again. “That’s where the chowder plan came from. Stella and Henry were pissed at me, atyou,for the salami thing, and because the games meant something to us too. Working together as a family, with Dad. I know we never played fair, but at least we were playing together. And…I guess we missed that. But if we couldn’t do anything at the games, then they wanted to make sure they got the last laugh. Even though that’s fucked up and wrong and I’msorry.”
“Why should I believe you?” I hold up the tres leches note. “I told you this less than two weeks ago.”
This catches him off guard. “That wasn’t…that was different.”
There’s no telling how far he’s willing to go. Even if he really didn’t know about the bet, about what we would lose just so he could get some brownie points with his dad, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change that I’ve been nothing but a pawn in his game since the beginning. We could stand here for hours, pulling apart the fact from the fiction, but what’s the point? Our relationship has always been a lie.
I toss the note onto the ground with the rest of the slips of paper. All the small pieces that make up our story. “Doesn’t look different to me.”
I don’t have enough energy to keep arguing. He doesn’t chase after me or call out my name when I storm out of the room. If Stella or Henry spot me, they stay out of my way. I slam the door behind me with as much force as I can, willing the glass to shatter. It doesn’t. I’m the only thing that’s broken.
Of course, Maya’s sitting in the kitchen when I finally make it back to our cabin. It’d be too easy for me to head straight to my room without running into the one person who saw this coming.
She peeks up from her sandwich, the first time she’s actually acknowledged my existence this week. Her hard-set frown softens, but she doesn’t say anything. My legs are unwilling to carry me the rest of the way to my room, keeping me in the doorway, locked under her gaze.
“You were right,” I say, willing my body to move now. “He hasn’t changed. Happy now?”
She stands up from the table, taking a tentative step toward me. “Devin…”
As badly as I want to tell her everything, I can’t. My body finally unlocks, carrying me past her and out the front door to the one place I know I can be alone. When the door closes behind me, I fall apart.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Mami’s pier is quiet. So quiet I’m not sure how long I’ve spent lying here, skimming my toes along the water. It’s long enough that the sky grows dark, and my stomach starts to grumble, but I can’t bring myself to head home yet. When there’s a rustle in the bushes, I assume it’s Dad coming to collect me, but I’m still not up for conversation. With how raw my throat feels I don’t think I’d have much of a voice anyway.
“Devin?” Maya whispers.
“If you’re here to say I told you so, then you can leave,” I mutter, the words muffled by the cool evening breeze.
The wood creaks as she approaches me. “I’m not.”
Then why is she here? After almost a full week of the silent treatment,thisis the day she decides to stop pretending I don’t exist?
