The Fine Art of Truth or Dare (23 page)

Of course I'd forgotten. I gave a small cough. He rolled his eyes and waved me off.

I moved a lot more slowly as Alex went out of my day than I had when he came into it. I figured he had some things to say that I didn't want to hear, and I tried to think of any way I could ask him just not to talk, please, without sounding sullen or slightly insane.

I walked him out to his car. Mr. Greco had gone up a ladder and loosened the lightbulb in the streetlamp again. He complains that it shines right into his bedroom. So he disables the light, PECO sends a crew to fix it, and it all begins again. It's been going on for years. The Grecos are nice people, especially Mrs. Greco. If she's home when the electric guys arrive, she takes them coffee and doughnuts.

Alex unlocked the car and opened the door. “Well, good night,” he said cheerfully. “Thanks for dinner.”

“Oh. Right.” I took a half step back toward the house. “You're welcome.”

“Ella.”

“Yeah?”

“You've gotta be kidding.”

PECO hadn't come yet, so it was pretty dark where we were standing. I don't know how his hand found mine so fast, but one second I was thinking about how much I didn't want to say good night, and the next I was up against his chest, standing on my toes with my feet between his.

“Is this okay?” he asked, his breath chocolaty and warm against my forehead.

“Yeah,” I answered, my own breath coming in quick little jumps. “Yeah.”

“Good. I have something I have to tell you.”

I waited.

“I hate that Klimt painting,” he said. “I really hate it.”

Then he was folding me into his coat and his face was right above mine, and there was only one kiss that mattered.

27

THE LIE

I didn't want to play. Frankie was in a mood for some reason, and when Frankie is in a mood, he can be a little mean. Sadie, on the other hand, was glowing slightly, and she hadn't even hit the Chloe's stage yet. She'd had a second date with Jared the night before. It had gone well.

I took a quick look at my phone. No message, but I didn't really expect one. My plans were already made. What I really needed was to see the time: 8:37.

“Why don't you just go already?” Frankie said snarkily. “We don't want to hold you up.”

“I have plenty of time.” I'd told them that I had to be home, that wedding plans were beginning to go into overdrive. Both statements were true, to a point. It was pretty much all wedding all the time these days. But the real truth there was that I stayed out of the way as much as possible. My shiny purple bridesmaid's dress and shoes fit, I knew the church drill, and I really didn't care what ultimately would be on the menu.

But I did have to go home. Alex was picking me up there.

For two weeks now, we'd been meeting when we could. Which, tragically, had been all of four short times: three at his house, once at mine, for a small amount of French before a lot of kissing. We'd had one furtive little interlude in an empty music room at school, but I'd been too nervous to really get into that one. At home, we were entwined, fingers and lips. At school, we barely spoke. It was still too new, too strange, maybe, to make public. I was still convinced that I was going to wake up, or walk out of a bathroom, or look up from my homework to discover I'd imagined the whole thing.

“Sades,” I said, pointing a
pepperoncini
I probably wouldn't eat. “Truth or Dare.”

“Truth. I'm eating.” She and Frankie were. I wasn't, not really. Alex had said something about food, so I'd been moving my salad around my plate.

“Okay.” It had to be a good one, something she would really want to share with her two best friends. It had to be a good one to make up for the fact that I was keeping some big secrets from my two best friends for the past two weeks. “Five years from today. Where, exactly, do you want to be?”

Her eyes lit up. Sadie loves that kind of question. “Ooh. Wow. Let me think. December, getting close to Christmas. I'll be twenty-one . . .”

“Passed out under the tree with a fifth of Jack, half a 7-Eleven rotisserie chicken, and a cat who poops in your shoes.” Frankie returned our startled glances with his lizard look. “Oh, wait. That's me. Sorry.”

I opted to ignore him. “Five years to the day, Sadie.”

She glanced quickly between Frankie and me. “Do we need a time-out here?”

“Nope,” I said. “Carry on.”

“Okay. Five years. I will be in New York visiting the pair of you because, while NYU is fab, I will be halfway through my final year of classics at Cambridge, trying to decide whether I want to be a psychologist or a pastry chef. You,” she said sternly to Frankie, “will be drinking appropriate amounts of champagne with your boyfriend, a six-three blond from Helsinki who happens to design for Tory Burch. Ah! Don't say anything. It's my future. You can choose a different designer when it's your go. I want the Tory freebies.” She turned to me. “We will be sipping said champagne in the middle of the Gagosian Gallery, because it is the opening night of your first solo exhibit. At which everything will sell.”

She punctuated the sentence by poking the air with a speared black olive.

“I love you,” I told her. Then, “But that wasn't really about you.”

“Oh, but it was,” she disagreed, going back to her salad. “It's exactly where I want to be. Although”—she grinned over a tomato wedge—“I might have the next David Beckham in tow.”

“The next David Beckham is a five-foot-tall Welshman named Madog Cadwalader. He has extra teeth and bow legs.”

“Really?” Sadie asked.

Frankie snorted. “No. Not really.”

“What is up with you tonight?” I demanded before I could stop myself.

He turned, very slowly, to face me. “Not a thing, as it happens. Why don't you tell us what's up with you? Hmm?”

“This isn't about me.”

“No?” Frankie tapped his fingers on the table. “Well, something about you is not quite right these days, Marino. And it's not just me who's noticed. Sadie?”

“Oh. Well, I don't know . . . yeah . . . maybe . . .”

“So, what is it?” Frankie demanded. “You're not eating, you've cut more classes in the last month than in the last two years, and you haven't mentioned Edward Willing in three weeks.”

“You hate when I talk about—”

“Three weeks, madam. And that's only as long as I've been keeping track. It's weird, and we're worried. Sadie?”

Sadie was twisting pleats into her sweater. It was blue, narrow, and new to her wardrobe. It was obviously also not one of her mother's picks. “Um . . . yeah. Maybe a little.”

“See?” Frankie gestured toward Sadie with both hands. “She's completely distraught.”

“Frankie.” I wanted to reach across the table and touch him, but didn't. I didn't think I could take it if he pulled away. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. For a second, he looked exactly like Daniel: cynical, bored, and liable to bite. “Well, that's funny,” he drawled. “I think you're lying through your teeth.”

My stomach clenched. “Why?”

“Because,” he said calmly, “in all the time I've known you, you have never once said those words.”

“What words?”

“‘There is nothing wrong with me.'”

“Oh, don't—”

“Never. You are a walking litany of imaginary flaws. So.” Frankie unfolded himself and rested his elbows on the table. It wobbled. He didn't. He studied me over his tented fingers. “Truth or Dare?”

“It's Sadie's turn to ask.”

“She passes,” he snapped.

“Hey,” I protested.

“Hey.” Sadie actually waved a hand between us. “Maybe we can talk about this tomorrow.”

“We could,” Frankie replied with suspicious agreeability. “Except I want to do it now. So, here's the question, Marino. What—”

“Dare.”

“Sorry?” he said.

“Dare. I'll take a dare.”

“Really?” he demanded.

“As long as it takes ten minutes or less. I have to go.” All I wanted, really, was to leave.

Frankie didn't say anything—or move—for the longest time. He just stared at me. Then, finally, he blinked, lowered his hands, and shrugged. “Sing.”

“Oh, come on—”

“Sing,” he repeated. “You know how. Or concede.”

That, I thought, would be so easy. It would also break something precious. In all our time together, none of us had ever conceded a dare. “Sadie. Sing with me?”

She nodded, but Frankie shook a finger at her. “You will not. Marino, you're on your own here.”

I pretty much stomped my way to the stage. Stavros's son Nic was manning the karaoke machine. His brows shot up when he saw me. “A first.”

It wasn't, actually. Frankie had bullied me into doing a duet on Sadie's birthday. We sang—surprise surprise—“Birthday” by the Beatles. It might have bombed, but it turned out that a third-string player for the Flyers was celebrating his birthday that day, too, so we ended up sharing the stage with four drunk hockey players, two female hockey groupies, and a die-hard Ringo fan. The crowd loved it.

“I have to do this,” I muttered. “I can do this.”

I didn't realize I was shaking slightly until Nic tapped my hand. “You want some advice?”

“Sure.”

“Choose one of these.” He flipped to a battered page. “And undo a few buttons.”

I didn't know if he was serious about the buttons—I suspected he probably was—but he'd given me a page full of crowd-pleasers. I contemplated “Good Riddance,” “Forget You,” and “Here's a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares.” Only I didn't know that one, and wasn't really out to stick it to Frankie. Well, maybe just a little.

“I can do this,” I said, pointing.

“Kill 'em” was Nic's comment as I hit the stage.

I took one look at Frankie's sulky face before settling my gaze on the back of the room. I could do this, because when I was done, I could go.

The music started. I hit the cue. “‘You walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht . . .'”

I wasn't bad. A little wavery in places, but pretty confident on. “‘I bet you think this song is about you, don't you?'” When I was done, a group of girls who reminded me of Cat Vernon and her crowd cheered loudly in back. Sadie was whistling, that two-fingers-in-the-mouth trick that I've always wanted to be able to do. She uses it for taxis and for Chloe's. On the very rare occasions that I am in a cab, Sadie is there, too, so I figure I'll live without that particular skill. It was nice, though, to hear her over the polite applause.

Frankie, I noticed as I flipped the mic up to its normal position, was staring at me through narrowed eyes, clapping so slowly that I could actually measure the silence in between beats.

I felt about three inches tall as I stepped off the stage.

• • •

“. . . and went down like a rock. Bam.”

“Oh, man. What did you do?”

“What could I do?” I shrugged. “I hopped up, took a bow, and ran. I was late to meet you.”

Alex was gently rubbing my bare knee. I'd rolled up my jeans leg to show him the bruise already blossoming there. “I would have caught you,” he said, fingers sliding to the inside of my leg and making my insides feel like jelly.

“Not likely, O Gallant One. The stage is only a foot high.”

“I gotta see this place sometime.”

“Sure.” I knew better, somehow. I wasn't going to take him. I couldn't, for more reasons than I wanted to list. Not that I could even picture him sitting there while people sang bad covers on a plywood stage, the food smells battling with polish and shoe leather.

We were sitting on the big, nice-smelling leather sofa in his den, me with my legs across his, a plate balanced in my lap. We'd stopped at Hikaru on our way from my house to his. I've walked by it enough times when I'd been to Head House Books or Hepburn's, the vintage clothing store across the street. But sushi isn't a big part of my life; Frankie and I inevitably vote Sadie down in favor of the South Street Diner. She always offers to pay. We always tell her that isn't the point. Even if it kind of is.

“What looks good?” Alex asked as we scanned the menu. Then, “Just no blowfish.” And, “I'm buying.”

I hadn't even heard of most of the options: fluke, conger, porgy. And those I had—mackerel, abalone, octopus—weren't all that appealing raw. “Um. Tempura?” I suggested, thinking you couldn't go too terribly wrong with something dipped and fried.

He shook his head. “This from a girl who likes anchovies?” He shared a sympathetic smile with the very nice waitress, then proceeded to order octopus, mackerel, yellowtail, and several different kinds of tuna. Raw.

“I am not eating that,” I told him in the den as he held out his chopsticks, loaded with a slice of octopus that had visible tentacles. I'd been fine with the tuna (I am the Tuna King of the Sea's great-great-granddaughter, after all), but had to draw the line somewhere.

“You have to trust me here. Come on. Be a brave girl. Open up.”

Duh.
I am not a brave girl. But I opened my mouth and let him feed me. “Mmm.”

“See? Excellent stuff.”

Actually, it was like eating a pencil eraser. With a vaguely fishy taste. “Delicious,” I managed after much chewing.

“All right. Fine. I give up.” Alex ate the remainder of the octopus and most of the pickled ginger in quick bites. Then he removed the plate from my thighs. I snagged the last piece of ginger before it was out of my reach. That I liked. “So, what shall we do now?”

Oh, the possibilities. I wiggled my eyebrows at him. He laughed.

“Yeah, absolutely,” he agreed. “But first . . . three things . . .”

He was determined. Every time we were together, we traded revelations and did some French. It wasn't usually the first thing, but eventually we got around to it. “You are an enigma wrapped in a mystery,” he teased me once. “And you're failing French.”

Of all the things I am, I don't think enigmatic is one of them. But I liked that he used the word. So I leaned back against the arm of the sofa and thought. “I don't know what you want to know.”

“Well, that's easy. Everything.”

“No. You don't. No one wants to know everything about . . .” I found myself at a loss for words.
His girlfriend?
His pupil with benefits?
We weren't at the noun stage. I wasn't sure if I would recognize the noun stage if I landed in it. “. . . another person. Mystery is good.”

He drummed his fingertips on my thigh. “Maybe. Maybe not. But I'll let it go. How about this: If I were to open the top drawer of your dresser, what would I find?”

“Are we back to discussing my underwear again?”

“Only in graphic detail . . .” He flicked my sore knee, but not where the bruise was. “
I
keep loose change and my oldest comic books in mine. Some people have journals or photographs or awards . . .”

“Okay, okay.” I sighed. “Underwear,” I said. “Two ancient swimsuits, and a magazine file.”

“Of . . . ?”

“Pictures I've pulled out of magazines.”

“Yes, thank you. I gathered that. What's in it?”

I squirmed a little and contemplated lying. Travel pix, shoes, hints on getting glue off of Ultrasuede . . . “Mostly pictures of models with short hair,” I confessed finally. “It's sort of a goal of mine.”