She's With Stupid Page 9

  Trying to make her body as small as possible, Emilie crossed her arms against the cold and against the feelings Ethan managed to evoke in her without effort. She was viciously forcing herself to think about how callous he had once been, how easily he had been able to hurt her. Emilie knew she could not let herself forget, even if it would be distressingly easy to fall into his arms and pretend all the bad memories away. Pretending was a very bad idea, destined to get her hurt again.

  “You and I have nothing to say to one another,” she said quietly.

  She made another feeble attempt to walk away, but Ethan pressed her more firmly between the tree and his rock solid form, careful to hold her body away from the bark of the tree with his tight grip on her hips. It was this automatic and seemingly genuine care, which he had always seemed to take with her, that made her long to alternately strangle him and kiss him. That was definitely unacceptable.

  “I’m gonna have to disagree with you, Emmy. We’ve got a lot to say.” He gave her a squeeze to prevent the protest she could feel brewing in her mind from spilling out of her mouth. “I’m going to start,” he warned.

  Emilie’s eyes narrowed to dangerous slits, but she didn’t try to escape him again. What would be the point?

  “I’m sorry,” he said simply.

  She waited a beat before replying. “That’s it?” she asked disdainfully, pointedly ignoring the brief flash of hurt she thought she saw in his eyes. “I should just pretend the last eleven years never happened because you’re sorry?” She rose on her tiptoes until their noses were almost touching. “Dream on.”

  He ground his jaw in frustration, and Emilie knew exactly what was running through his head — she had always been able to tell what he was thinking and feeling, often before even he knew. That this particular talent should resurface at this particular moment infuriated her almost as much as it petrified her. And she had the strangest feeling that he knew it.

  Ethan held her gaze, willing her to relax her guard, just a little. He knew she was about to bolt, knew she was just as aware of the undeniable connection that still existed between them as he was, knew she was scared of it. He couldn’t really fault her for that. But there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that she had loved him once, trusted him, and as he stared into her dark eyes, sparking again with flecks of gold in her anger and confusion, he made a decision: she was going to love him again, just as soon as he could figure out how to make it happen.

  Purposefully entwining his fingers in her hair until his palm rested against the back of her head, Ethan lowered his forehead to hers while his other hand ran up and down her arm in a manner he might use to gentle a skittish colt. He could tell the action surprised her because she suddenly stopped resisting. A stillness settled over them until the only sound in the yard was the faint chirp of a bird and the soft breathing coming from under the oak tree. They stayed that way for several minutes, neither of them willing or able to break the strangely peaceful moment.

  “I know what you’re trying to do,” Ethan finally murmured. “I’ve been doing it since I was seventeen, and I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t work, Emmy.”

  Emilie stiffened in his arms, the earlier tension returning full force. Ethan held her tighter, feeling like she was already slipping away from him.

  He sighed softly into her hair before pulling slightly back to cup her face in his hand. “Sooner or later you’re going to have to stop running from this, from us.”

  Ethan remained motionless for what seemed like an eternity, waiting for her to respond. When she finally did, he felt like he had been sucker punched again.

  She opened her eyes and met his stare with a solemn of her own. “You’re wrong,” she whispered before stepping out of his arms.

  With a final look of resolve, she walked around him and back towards the house without a backwards glance.

  Chapter 6

  Three days after the engagement party from hell, Emilie sat in her classroom mulling over why she found it impossible to get Ethan freaking Drake out of her head. She had been so certain she was prepared to face him again, armed as she was with a new boyfriend, a seriously hot outfit, and a life that had nothing to do with him.

  She had obviously been an idiot.

  The boyfriend had made his entrance too late. The dress had backfired by serving to whet Ethan’s appetite for things. And the life she had been carefully crafting for herself over the last few months had felt hopelessly fragile when she compared it to the powerful, overwhelming emotions that just a few minutes alone with Ethan had managed to stir up inside her. He was like a damned tornado, messing up her life and tearing it down until all she had left were bits and pieces that she couldn’t quite make sense of.

  Leo hadn’t exactly helped matters when she had rushed back into the kitchen the other night only to find him waiting with a dour scowl on his face. He had immediately chastised her behavior, informing her that she must have lost her own mind if she thought it was in any way acceptable for her to leave him in ‘a room full of strangers after a deranged mental patient tried to assault’ and insisting that she owed him a serious explanation.

  Though she had hastily apologized in what she had hoped was a properly penitent tone, Leo had been unmoved. And after she’d ushered him out the door to avoid any more drama, it had taken nearly two more hours of saying she was sorry and listening to him berate her poor judgment to get him to forgive her rudeness. Emilie had felt drained by the entire experience and put out by the unsettling realization that she hadn’t cared about gaining Leo’s pardon nearly as much as she should have — she’d ultimately just wanted him to shut his yap.

  Emilie was prepared to blame Kate for her recent lack of enthusiasm for Leo, since it was mainly Kate who had planted all these thoughts about Ethan in her head in the first place. And, really, what did Kate know about healthy relationships? The guy she was choosing to tie herself to for life ranked high on Emilie’s list of potential serial killers.

  Staring vacantly at the stack of un-graded papers sitting on her desk, Emilie tried to muster up the will to use her free bell wisely. But Ethan’s face and eyes and smell kept intruding on all of her best laid plans. It was completely embarrassing.

  Emilie had made a promise to her sixteen-year-old self that she would never again make a fool of herself for anyone the way she had for Ethan, and she had been keeping that promise for years without any difficulty. Then she had met Leo, who was normal and simple and the antithesis of everything she had decided a long time ago was bad news. Things had been going so well, and she had done everything she could to forget Stupid Ethan and his stupid arms and his stupid hair…basically, his stupid everything. Now here she was, nearly hyperventilating after one evening in his presence.

  That he had that kind of power over her even after all these years seemed to suggest she might still be stupidly in love with the jackass, which made her an even bigger jackass.

  On that potentially life-altering thought, Emilie managed to stumble over to a small door behind her desk. St. Mary’s Academy had been built in the 1880’s as a convent, and the whole building was full of concealed enclaves that the nuns had used for prayer or confession or whatever it was that nuns did all day — Emilie had been raised Baptist, so she was vague on the details. She was, however, grateful for the nooks and crannies that filled her own classroom because they allowed her to hide all sorts of things like school supplies, books, even one totally shaken teacher.

  The room behind her desk was right next to the chalk board and looked like an enlarged cubby hole from the outer classroom, but it was actually big enough to comfortably house a heavy wooden desk, extra textbooks, an odd-looking fainting couch, and several long-forgotten brooms and buckets past inhabitants had left behind. Emilie enjoyed the hidden Narnia vibe back there and had fashioned a little office for herself, squeezing a mini-fridge and a microwave against the wall and shoving the old desk closer to the window so that it looked out on the passing traffic and the ice-l
aden branches of the maple trees lining the sidewalk below.

  She took little pleasure in the room today, barely noticing the light layer of dust on the windowsill as she slid down the wall to tuck herself beneath the window and stare into space as she tried to make sense of her emotions. She was uncertain how long she sat there before she heard familiar muttering and whispering coming from her classroom. Sighing fatalistically, she crawled to the door, opened it a crack, and peaked out to see Lana scratching her head by the chalkboard and Kate awkwardly crouching behind her desk, with her rear end in the air.

  “Did you really expect to find me under the desk?”

  Both women jumped at the sound of her seemingly disembodied voice. Kate lost her balance and fell face forward over the chair.

  It was Lana who glimpsed Emilie’s red head in the slight opening behind the little door. “Hey,” Lana said. “You scared us.”

  Kate, having managed to disentangle herself from the cords and files under the desk, looked down to where Lana was addressing her remarks. “Jeez, Em, talk about creepy. Do you always spook people like that?”

  Emilie shrugged. “Sorry.”

  She opened the door wider and her friends shuffled in, took brief stock of their surroundings, and obligingly slid onto the floor to form a circle around Emilie. After shutting the door again with a firm click and sliding the lock into place, Emilie looked at them. “What are you doing here?” she asked listlessly.

  Kate looked pointedly at Lana. “This was your bright idea.”

  Lana rolled her eyes and turned towards Emilie, who had pulled her knees back into her chest and was staring morosely at her Kate’s scuffed shoes.

  “You’ve been skulking around the apartment for the last three days avoiding all human contact, Em. I figured if we cornered you at work, you wouldn’t be able to get away.” She shrugged apologetically. “I remembered this was your free period.”

  “You have to tell us what’s going on,” Kate urged. “Is it Ethan?”

  Emilie gave her a look that effectively conveyed her deeply held belief that Kate occasionally possessed the mental acumen of a primate.

  “Okay, so it is about Ethan,” Kate said dryly. “Look, I don’t know what happened between you two, but—”

  “No,” Emilie snapped. “You don’t know anything about it at all.”

  “Then tell us, Em,” Lana said in her most patient tone of voice. “It’s been years; it’s time you stopped keeping whatever happened all bottled up inside you.”

  “Yeah,” Kate said hastily. “I bet once you get it off your chest it won’t even seem so bad.”

  Emilie stared at her friends for long moments, realizing that perhaps it was time she stopped hiding the reasons behind her staunch anti-Ethan sentiments. But the main reason she’d kept quiet for so long was she didn’t know how to tell them. Every time she tried, it sounded so small — how was she supposed to put into words what a complete fool she had made of herself, stupidly falling for a boy who didn’t want her love, a boy who had broken her heart and left her to pick up the pieces without so much as a backward glance?

  And how did she explain that, in spite of everything, she was afraid she might still love him anyway?

  Emilie stared straight ahead, avoiding their concerned looks. Finally, she took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and softly said, “I’ll try.”

  The summer just before she turned nine, Emilie, ignoring Lana’s heated protests and her own good sense, climbed the tallest tree she could find in order to disprove Kate’s assertion that you could see all the way to Canada from the top. She was fine on her way up and quite gratified to learn that she was right — the only thing you could see from up there was water and a few boats drifting lazily on the lake. Emilie had leaned down to report her discovery when a sudden wave of dizziness overtook her. The realization of just how high she had climbed and just how steep the drop was effectively kept her immobilized, and, though she had willed herself to go back down as quickly as she had ascended, her limbs refused to obey her.

  As a result, she was left clinging in terror to the highest branch of the tree while Kate ran for help. Lana had waved frantically below, begging her to get out of the tree, but Emilie’s vocal cords had been paralyzed just as surely as her body and she could do nothing but hold tighter to the branch while she tried desperately to make herself move.

  Then Kate had appeared below, out of breath from running so fast and clutching Ethan’s hand. He had looked up the length of the tree, and the moment he saw Emilie hanging precariously above he had grabbed the nearest limb and started climbing.

  Ethan was comfortingly calm as he eased onto the branch beside her and grasped her hand. “You have to let go, Emmy,” he had softly stated. She frantically shook her head at that ludicrous idea, but he had just smiled. “Emmy, I’ve got you. I won’t let you fall.”

  He had seemed so determined, so confident. So she had eased her grip on the branch and climbed onto his back. Emilie could still remember how safe she’d suddenly felt as Ethan had slowly made his way back down to the bottom with her arms and legs wrapped securely around him, like nothing bad could ever happen as long as she was with Ethan. She couldn’t explain how or why, but Emilie had known in that moment that she would love Ethan Drake for the rest of her life. She just didn’t have a clue then what that actually meant.

  By the time she was eleven, Emilie began to understand that what she felt for Ethan was different from what Lana and Kate felt for him. To them he was just an easygoing almost-brother, someone fun to tease and hang out with. But for Emilie he was chocolate ice cream and fireworks and nights sleeping under the stars. He never once balked at allowing Emilie to direct the amateur musical productions they often put on in his Auntie Olive’s parlor, he always gave her the biggest slice of cake, and he always made her feel safe and special and loved. And though she didn’t know how or why, she had somehow known that Ethan felt the same way about her.

  Emilie had blindly believed, in the way that children do, that things would always be that way between them. So, when Ethan sprouted whiskers and biceps and began to find any and every excuse to avoid spending time with the girls, Emilie had been confused, but not overly concerned.

  After all, he would still sneak into Emilie’s room at night, careful not to wake Lana and Kate, and take her hand as they slipped out the first floor window and raced to the lakeshore. Content to sit quietly under a tree by the lake, watching the moonlight reflect off of the water, they didn’t talk much, could sometimes spend hours leaning into each other and staring at the lake. But the older they got, the more palpable the peculiar tension between them had grown, and the midnight walks became more and more infrequent until they stopped altogether the summer Emilie turned fifteen.

  Pathetically unfazed by his growing distance, Emilie had followed him around like a little lost puppy, desperate for a crumb of affection while Ethan had gone right on pretending she wasn’t there. When Lana and Kate were around, he simply ignored her, but when it was just the two of them he made no attempt to hide his scowls and surly comments.

  Her refusal to accept the baffling withdrawal of his affections led Emilie to corner Ethan one early September day, the last one she ever spent with him. Kate and Lana were nursing summer colds and napping, so Emilie had screwed up all of her courage to catch up with him in Aunt Olive’s front hall before he could escape.

  “What do you want, Emmy?” he demanded in exasperation. He had scratched his chin, presumably trying to stroke the three hairs he had been referring to as a goatee all summer, and he’d had that look of dread that seemed to creep into eyes whenever she was around.

  Emilie, too stupid to be offended, had simply stared him down until he had the grace to be embarrassed by his rudeness. His cheeks were slashed with color when she stepped closer to him, and he actually flinched when she placed her hand on his arm, which she studiously ignored.

  “Ethan, can’t we go down by the lake?” she had pleaded like a
dope. “Just for today, please can’t things be like they used to be?”

  His gaze finally met hers, and, just when she was certain he was going to tell her to get lost again, he had given her a slow, reluctant smile. Emilie had beamed back and grabbed his hand to pull him out the door before he could change his mind.

  Though Ethan didn’t say much, he had at least seemed to relax as the day wore on. Emilie worked all her charm, flirting with him shamelessly until the wall Ethan had built around himself had seemed to crack a little. By early evening he’d even loosened up enough to tease her and splash with her in the lake, which was virtually empty now that summer was drawing to a close and the tourists had all gone home. It almost felt like there was no one else but them in the whole world, and Emilie could still remember how relieved she’d felt to have finally gotten her Ethan, the real Ethan, back.

  “Isn’t this fun?” she asked, briskly rubbing a towel over her newly formed curves. They were sitting on Aunt Olive’s private dock, Ethan watching her like a hawk from three feet away as she dried herself in the setting sun. “It’s just like old times.”

  He grunted in reply and abruptly stood up, turning his back on her to stare pensively at the lake. Emilie smiled at his restlessness and stood, tiptoeing quietly behind him to gently rest her head against the middle of his back. As if he had been burned, Ethan swung around with a panicked gleam in his eyes, grabbed her arm, and unexpectedly shoved her right into the lake. Emilie was so astonished by this sudden turn of events that she hit the lake with her mouth open and immediately swallowed a large amount of water. She sputtered and flailed her arms but failed to gain her purchase and quickly went under.

  To his credit, the instant he realized that she was sinking instead of swimming, Ethan jumped into the lake to rescue her. She’d felt his arm around her waist just as she was starting to run out of breath, and he took them both back to the surface an instant later. Gasping for air, Emilie held on to him for dear life, too stunned to resent the fact that he had been the one to push her into the lake in the first place. His grip remained tight on her until he reached the edge of the dock and lifted her out of the water to help her climb the ladder.