Privileged (26 page)
I began humming Bob Marley’s “One Love.”
“Wrong island.”
I spun, surprised to see Will stepping through the sand in a black tuxedo minus the tie, his white shirt open at the collar. He looked like one of those Rat Pack guys from the sixties, like Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin, singers my counterculture parents had loathed. Will’s sapphire-colored eyes shone in the torchlight.
“It really does scream Caribbean, doesn’t it?” he asked conversationally, as if we were casual friends who’d happened to run in to each other. “It was my stepmother’s idea. She and my father went to, you guessed it, Barbados for their honeymoon. I’m sure they never left the resort and saw nothing of the actual island, but it’s the thought that counts.” He sat on one of the bar stools, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. “So, hi.”
“Hi. Long time no see.” I winced. Had I really just said long time no see? Me? Miss Wit? “I love a guy who trolls the beach in a tux,” I added. There. That was better.
“My dad’s giving a thing for some buyers. Black-tie. Very stuffy bunch.” He nearly smiled, but not in a happy way.
“Not really Hanan’s clientele?”
Will laughed. “My father would die before he’d show Hanan’s work.”
I kicked a toe into the sand. “But you told her you were going to. She’s counting on you.”
Will frowned. “Never a wise thing to do.” He went behind the bar. “How about a Red Stripe?”
“Aren’t we supposed to be in Barbados? Someone has geography issues.”
“That would be the stepmother again. It’s not her strong suit. So few things are.” He took two beers from a small fridge, handed me one, and clinked his bottle against mine. We both took long sips. Will leaned an elbow on the bar. “I was actually about to come see you.”
Okay, yeah, I admit it. I got a little thrill. “That’s nice.”
“To wish the twins good luck tomorrow,” he clarified.
Ouch.
“We just got back from London,” he explained. “We were there for the winter auctions. Sotheby’s, Christie’s. Then Tajan in Paris.”
“Nice life.”
“Someone has to live it.” He took another long sip. “So I was wondering how they’re doing. If they’re ready for their test.”
I ran my thumbnail around the beer bottle. “Honestly? I don’t know. But I do know they both worked their asses off.”
“That’s a first.”
“I’ll tell you something even more impressive. Laurel paid me.”
“Wow. That should be on the front page of
The Shiny Sheet
.” Will came around the bar. “Walk?”
“Sure.”
We headed for the waterline, walking in silence. Something he’d said was bothering me. “Why did you say before that it isn’t wise to count on you?”
“Every once in a while I get delusions of independence—forge out on my own with my own gallery, representing the kind of art that I love . . .” He shrugged. “But let’s face it, Megan. I’m a rich kid who’s never really had to work hard at anything. Why bother?”
“To prove that you’re not your father.”
He glanced at me. “To you?”
“To yourself.”
“Ah.”
We strolled on in silence as the waves rushed to shore.
“I have a question, Megan Smith,” Will said at last. “That morning on Worth Avenue. That guy in the café. And at the Christmas ball. Who was he, really?”
A brief editorial comment: Lies are exhausting.
Suddenly, I was overcome with malaise. I wanted to sink into the sand and go to sleep. Which would be one more way for me to avoid telling the truth.
Okay. So, no sand nap. I would tell Will now and the twins tomorrow. But how to start? Where to begin?
“I knew James at Yale,” I said carefully.
“Yeah, I kind of got that.” I heard the tension in Will’s voice. “And?”
“And there was a time when we were . . . close.”
“I kind of got that, too. But why didn’t you just tell me?”
“I should have,” I agreed. “When I first came here, after the twins pulled that nude-swim thing—I hated them. I hated their friends. And
you
were one of the friends.”
“What does that have to do with the Yale guy?”
I sighed. “Just . . .” I cracked my knuckles, which is not something I usually do. “Stay with me, it’s a long story.”
“Ooooh-kay.” Will knit his eyebrows at me, kicking at the sand as he walked.
“Until we went to see Hanan, I didn’t really care who you were or what you thought. But then everything changed.”
He stopped walking and turned to me, waiting.
“Because I saw who you really were.” I stopped walking, too. “And who you really were—are—is so . . . so . . . I thought if you knew—”
In the movies, this is where the girl’s great confession grinds to a screeching halt, the guy pulls the girl to him, and then he kisses the hell out of her.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my movie moment.
His lips were on mine, one hand tangled in my hair, the other pressing me to him. Everything I’d ever imagined, including my bathtub fantasies, was left in the dust by the breathless reality of his mouth on mine. My brain flicked momentarily to Lily and how I’d seen him kiss her, too, but then he tugged off my jacket and pulled my T-shirt over my head, and all thoughts of everything and everyone were gone. Then he put his tux jacket on the sand and laid me down on it. Soon I was naked and he was naked and I understood all those movie metaphors about crashing waves.
I’m pretty sure I moaned some things that would indicate I really, really liked what was happening. I was even happy that I’d surrendered the pink—and that Will was the one who would see my, um, art.
It turns out that sex on the beach really is hot. I mean, the sand thing does add a certain . . . tactile element that you’re not necessarily looking for, but it couldn’t have bothered either of us very much, because we went back for seconds. What can I tell you? I had a lot of sexual tension built up.
I think we fell asleep briefly, what with all the fresh air, deep breathing, and aerobic activity. I woke up in Will’s arms. He kissed my forehead. Then his lips started heading south. I tugged him back up to me.
“Let’s go to my bed,” I whispered to him. “I’ll sneak you in.”
“How high school,” Will teased. He rose and hoisted me up. I pulled on my T-shirt and jeans but balled up my La Perlas in my jean jacket. Hand in hand, we headed for Les Anges. Every few feet he stopped to kiss me, to whisper my name in a throaty voice.
We climbed the stone steps and padded across the pool deck, then tiptoed to the front door of the twins’ manse. He pinched my ass on the way up the grand curving staircase. I swatted at him and put a finger to my lips, warning him to be quiet. At the top of the stairs, he pulled me to him again and gave me another sizzling kiss.
Something between a groan and a sigh escaped from my mouth. If my IQ hadn’t dropped to somewhere south of my navel, I probably would have been embarrassed. But it had, so I wasn’t.
I was about to point the way to my suite, when the lights snapped on. There were Sage and Rose, blocking the way. They both wore Juicy Couture sweats. There was a hard darkness in their eyes that said something was terribly wrong.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Why aren’t you—”
“How could you?” Rose asked, her face gray under her tan.
“We know everything.” Sage stared at me with pure hate.
Choose the best antonym for the following word:
SUCCESS
(a) failure
(b) devastation
(c) loserly
(d) loserly devastating failure
(e) all of the above
R
ose took in the sand in my hair, the sand in Will’s hair, the La Perla thong sticking out of my jean jacket pocket, and made the obvious leap. “You two were doing it on the beach.”
Will and I stood there. The visual clues were kind of hard to deny.
“Would you like to know who you just fucked?” Sage asked Will savagely. “Or should I say, who you’re getting fucked by?”
That was when I saw what was dangling on a cord from Sage’s left hand.
My flash drive. Oh God. My flash drive. How could I have been so stupid? I had erased all my Palm Beach notes on my computer after we’d watched the sunrise on New Year’s morning. I’d even wiped out my computer’s trash bin. But I hadn’t thought about the backup on my flash drive. They must have read every damning note I’d taken over six weeks here in Palm Beach.
“What’s she talking about?” Will asked me.
Sage smiled coldly and twirled the flash drive. “Do you want to tell him, Megan? Or should we?”
I wanted to barf, or run away, or fall to my knees and plead for mercy. But of course, I couldn’t do any of that. Instead, I stood there while the twins launched into the story of how they’d found me out.
After I’d left to walk on the beach, they’d been too nervous to sleep, they explained. So they’d come to my room to talk. Since I wasn’t there, they’d decided to review a few practice SAT problems for the hell of it.
“We booted up your iBook to look for some examples,” Rose told me. “We couldn’t find any files, and then we saw this.”
Sage held up my flash drive. “So we plugged it in, and what do you think we saw, Will?” she asked him. “Files. With our names on them.”
“Your name, too, Will,” Rose added.
I looked at him for the first time. His face was torn by emotions, and I could read them all. Suspicion. Doubt. Hope that this wasn’t true. Fear that it was.
“Ask her what’s in those files,” Sage urged him.
“You don’t have to ask, Will. I’ll tell you.” My knees were weak, but on I went. “They’re notes. For an article I was going to write about Palm Beach. But I changed my mind and decided not to write it. I deleted them from my hard drive. I guess I forgot to get rid of the backup.”
I saw Will’s expression change from confusion to anger. “You really expect us to believe that, Megan? A girl as smart as you are ‘forgot’ to erase her backup?”
“It’s the truth,” I insisted.
“
Truth?
Jesus, Megan.” Sage laughed bitterly. “You pretended to tutor us, pretended to be our friend, when all the time it was a big act to fuck us in print.”
“And do you want to know what she said about you, Will?” Rose asked with cold fury. “That you’re a pathetic former frat boy who hangs out with high school girls. That what others would call statutory rape, you call getting lucky.”
“You wrote that?” he asked me.
“I can explain,” I said in the timeworn fashion of those caught in the act. “I made those notes before I really knew you—I was being flip because I was angry, like I told you on the beach.” I turned back to the twins. “When I first came here, I really did come as a tutor. I didn’t have any other agenda.”
“Oh, please,” Sage scoffed. “Who the hell are you? What’s your name? And don’t tell us it’s fucking Megan Smith.”
“But it
is
Megan Smith,” I said miserably.
“Yuh,” Sage scoffed. “I bet. So where are you from, Megan Smith?”
I gulped hard. “I was raised in Concord, New Hampshire. I went to public school. My dad’s a professor at the University of New Hampshire. My mom’s a nurse-practitioner.”
“So you’re not from Philadelphia,” Will stated. Then he swore under his breath. “I knew there was something off.”
“I never said that I was from Philadelphia, actually,” I pointed out in a lame attempt to explain myself. I turned to the twins. “You guys did a Google search and decided some rich girl from there was me. And okay, I let you think it. But if I hadn’t, you never would have studied with me.”
“But once we were studying, you didn’t correct the record, did you?” Sage challenged.
“No,” I said miserably. “I didn’t.”
“Not even after you allegedly wiped out your notes?”
I shook my head. The facts were the facts. I sneaked a glance at the twins. Rose looked like she was ready to cry. Sage, on the other hand, was obviously prepared for first-degree homicide.
“Megan, there’s one thing I don’t understand,” Rose murmured.
“Yes?”
“If you’re not the girl from Philadelphia, and you’re not rich—where’d you get all the clothes?”
“Marco. He helped me.”
“We’ll be talking to Grandma.” Sage sniffed, her eyes narrowed.
There was no sense in telling her that Grandma already knew. She’d find out soon enough.
“Why’d you do it?” Will asked, bewildered. “Why did you lie about everything?”
“I tried to tell you before . . . on the beach. That’s what I was trying to say before we—you know.” I shook my head, trying to remove my momentary mental lapse into beach ecstasy from my brain. “When I first came here, I didn’t even know why I was here. But then that first night, when they played that trick on me and—”
“Hold on,” Will ordered. “You’re blaming this on the twins?”
“No,” I said. “I mean . . . Yes, I did the research. Yes, I took notes. But—”
“You changed your mind about writing it,” Rose finished the sentence for me in a jeering singsong.
“I’m telling you the truth, Rose,” I insisted, hearing my voice shake. “And I just wish . . . I wish you could find it in your heart to believe me.”
Sage made a face. “Why should we? You lied about everything.”
“Because if you look at my iBook, the files are gone. And I haven’t taken a single note in two weeks!”
“She fucking used us, Rose,” Sage concluded. “And she wanted to make money for doing it.”
“But look at all the work I did with you,” I pointed out. “That was real!”
“Anyone could have done that,” Rose said, her voice flat. She took the flash drive from her sister and tossed it at me. “I
trusted
you.”
What could I possibly say? “I’m so,
so
sorry.” I reached for her hand, but she jerked it away from me.
“Tell it to someone who cares,” she spat.
“Megan?” Will asked, chewing on the inside of his cheek. “That guy James? Was he in on this, too?” He saw the answer in my eyes. “Holy shit,” he muttered, as much to himself as to me. “ He
was.
”
“Who’s James?” Sage demanded.
“Ask your tutor,” Will told her.
There was nothing I could say or do, no explanation I could give, that would make the three of them understand. It was a lost cause. But I didn’t want the girls to hurt themselves any more than I’d hurt them.